July 15, 2022
An unnamed narrator--known only as Shit, the nickname bestowed on her by her best friend--recounts the events of an emotionally tumultuous summer in a working-class community in the Canary Islands. Shit and Isora are schoolgirls, and the end of their school year marks the beginning of what passes for summer vacation in their nontouristy area of Tenerife. After her mother's death, Isora is being parented by her harsh grandmother, who runs the village's minimarket. Shit's parents disappear all day to jobs supporting the island's construction and tourist trades. Left to their own devices, the two inseparable girls pass their days playing with Barbies, watching telenovelas, obsessing over pop lyrics, and exploring their nascent sexuality. Isora is in search of experiences of all sorts; less-assertive Shit develops a growing obsession with Isora. Looming over the girls' beleaguered existence are an omnipresent cloud cover of dust and the island's volcanic mountain; a day at the beach seems like an unattainable goal. Abreu, who writes both prose and poetry in Spanish, charts the girls' summer course to adolescence in straightforward, nonromantic prose interspersed with occasional poetic, dream- or nightmarelike passages. This translation from Spanish by Sanches retains the slang and idioms of the neighborhood dialect, enhancing the well-grounded sense of place established by Abreu. Comparisons to another duo of similarly disadvantaged childhood friends created by Elena Ferrante may seem inevitable. Any actual similarities between the pairs fade early on in the work as Abreu's girls work their way through weight-shaming, an apparent local obsession with excrement, masturbation, and sexual obsession. This frank exploration of the work of growing up as a girl in a place with limited horizons (don't forget the clouds!) illuminates while it disturbs. This is not Little Women.
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June 30, 2022
The setting is Tenerife of the Canary Islands, but not the Tenerife of the rich and famous. This is the Tenerife of the working class who live there, far from the glamorous life. In the summer of 2005, two 10-year-old girls long for something beyond what they know. The narrator has the colorful if unfortunate nickname of Shit. Her best friend, Isora, seems older and is certainly more streetwise. Their relationship is a bit one-sided. Shit will do anything for Isora, who seems to care only about herself. Like the portrayals of girls in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, Abreu offers brave and unvarnished renderings of complicated female friendships, painful sexual awakenings (with an LGBTQ twist), and gritty dialects, but she is in a category by herself. Her prose is bold and direct, and her characterization of two similar but different girls on the cusp of adolescence is as vivid as anything being written today. This violent, graphic, scatological, and poetic debut is already slated for a screen adaptation.
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Starred review from August 1, 2022
Abreu’s emotionally resonant debut charts the tumultuous friendship between two 10-year-old girls over the course of the summer of 2005 in the Canary Islands. The unnamed narrator is fascinated by her brazen and enigmatic friend, Isora, the granddaughter of Chela, an abusive matriarch who manages the neighborhood minimarket and cares for Isora after her mother’s suicide. Isora calls the shots in the friendship and nicknames the narrator “Shit.” In potent, stream-of-consciousness prose, Abreu details the girls’ long summer days spent in each other’s presence: the afternoons dedicated to memorizing the lyrics of Aventura songs, dipping their toes in the canal and imagining they’re at San Marcos beach, and the timid narrator eating burnt cake just so Isora may watch her after the latter is forced into a diet by the overcritical Chela. (Isora also develops an eating disorder.) Along the way, Abreu ingeniously picks apart the submissive narrator’s conflicting feelings of resentment, admiration, and sexual curiosity, and reveals the way these emotions quickly turn devastating once a traumatic assault changes the power dynamics upon which the girls’ friendship is based. Abreu’s exhilarating chronicle of a young friendship is not to be missed.