by Gerardo Semano Cordova
This book is a beautiful, sorrowful, queer meditation on death, grief and the life we find in the midst of it. Told from four perspectives, it show. that no one grief belongs to any one person.
As we learn from the blurb, a young mother, Magos, loses her son. He was born with only one lung and that lung carried him through more life than his birth doctors ever expected. Santiago was ten when the lung gave out and Magos immediately grapples with both love and hate for the organ that allowed her son to live but that also put such harsh limits on that life. But it’s from that lung that she ultimately derives comfort and even some degree of closure.
Magos take a piece of lung and holds onto it, not being able to let it go. Not being able to let her son go. Having left her husband behind to his own grief, she returns to Mexico and is confronted with a local piece of folklore that a part of the body kept from the dead can be fed. What it may grow into from that point is a little less clear, but it’s enough to give a grieving mother hope.
This little piece of lung will unite the lives of many people throughout the tale, each taking their turn to voice what this ritual has done to impact their lives.
The final voice is the most moving of all.
What is grief? Is it a way to freedom? Can it keep you caged? Does it keep others trapped with you? This book asks many questions and answers none of them. But it’s a beautiful conundrum.
Quiara writes 