A Deceptive Cover 
 Sometimes I don't understand publishers at all. They give a book a cartoon-like cover, with cheerful silhouettes of waving cactuses and palms and a girl's head emerging from the petals of a rose... and expect the readers to think what?* The book certainly begins a bit that way, in the childish voice of a pubescent girl named Ladydi Garcia Martinez, talking about growing up in a small village in the Guerrero province of Mexico. It is a simplistic, short-breathed voice that annoyed me too much to draw me into the story, but I suppose it fits the cover. 
 Though even at the beginning there are contrasts. This is a land where all the adult men have emigrated illegally to the U.S., and where girls are brought up as boys when young and made to look ugly when older, lest they get stolen by the narcos and trafficked into various kinds of crime. As indeed does happen, notably to one of Ladydi's friends, Paula, "the most beautiful girl in Mexico," who returns covered in cigarette burns and semi-catatonic. Ladydi's route is somewhat different, but it also puts her in the midst of drugs, sex, betrayal, and murder, a very far cry indeed from the folkloric book cover. I'm afraid Jennifer Clement lost me by this point. I can accept that the lives of many young women in some parts of Mexico are a tragedy waiting to happen, but the author did not overcome my reluctance to being dragged into the darkness with them. 
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 *Let me explain my remarks on the cover. A book jacket engages in a dialogue with the reader before purchase, and with the text of the book itself once reading has begun. Yes, I had read the opening paragraphs and knew a little of what the novel would be about. I was reluctant to order it. But then I looked at the cover and assumed that either there would be some constructive contrast between the naivete of the style and the repulsiveness of the subject (there wasn't), or that the character would somehow keep her innocence throughout or be transformed in the end. Well, if Ladydi keeps any innocence, it is only in contrast to the degradation around her, and although Clement does seem to be aiming at some uplift at the end, it is tiny and temporary at best. So no dialogue between cover and text, except in the most crassly contrasting way, and any dialogue with the reader turns out to be highly misleading.