But things fall apart when a misunderstanding leads to her being accused of murder and jailed.Ĭlement’s dark – and often darkly comic – novel of lives turned upside down by Mexico’s all-pervading drugs trade, though heartbreaking, is not devoid of hope. So when she is offered a maid’s job in a mansion in the glitzy resort of Acapulco, Ladydi jumps at the chance to start a new life. Ladydi and her friends dream of escaping their suffocating world of poverty and fear. Tattooed with name of her “owner”, Paula also has a pattern of cigarette burns on her arm – self-inflicted marking by sex slaves so that “if we’re found dead someplace, everyone will know we were stolen”.Ĭlement’s first-person telling of the story through her spirited narrator, named after the late Princess of Wales, in spare prose delivers emotional immediacy and demands engagement. She returns a year after her abduction, dead-eyed and having regressed to infancy. Except for Ladydi’s friend, Paula, who is “more beautiful than Jennifer Lopez”.
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