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Prayers for the Stolen Paperback – November 4, 2014

by Jennifer Clement (Author)

4.3 1,288 ratings

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The haunting novel of love and survival that inspired Mexico’s official submission for International Feature Film—now shortlisted for the 94th Academy Awards® and streaming on Netflix

“Prayers for the Stolen gives us words for what we haven’t had words for before, like something translated from a dream in a secret language. . . . Beguiling, and even crazily enchanting.”—Francisco Goldman, New York Times Book Review

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER PRIZE • AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

Ladydi Garcia Martínez is fierce, funny, and smart. She was born into a world where being a girl is a dangerous thing. In the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, women must fend for themselves, as their men have left to seek opportunities elsewhere. Here in the shadow of the drug war, bodies turn up on the outskirts of the village to be taken back to the earth by scorpions and snakes. School is held sporadically, when a volunteer can be coerced away from the big city for a semester. In Guerrero the drug lords are kings, and mothers disguise their daughters as sons, or when that fails they “make them ugly”—cropping their hair, blackening their teeth, anything to protect them from the rapacious grasp of the cartels. And when the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight.

While her mother waits in vain for her husband’s return, Ladydi and her friends dream of a future that holds more promise than mere survival, finding humor, solidarity, and fun in the face of so much tragedy. When Ladydi is offered work as a nanny for a wealthy family in Acapulco, she seizes the chance, and finds her first taste of love with a young caretaker there. But when a local murder tied to the cartel implicates a friend, Ladydi’s future takes a dark turn. Despite the odds against her, this spirited heroine’s resilience and resolve bring hope to otherwise heartbreaking conditions.

An illuminating and affecting portrait of women in rural Mexico, and a stunning exploration of the hidden consequences of an unjust war, Prayers for the Stolen is an unforgettable story of friendship, family, and determination.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[A] beautiful, heart-rending novel . . . fiercely observed . . . [Clement] achieves the formidable feat of smooth, clear English that pulses with an energy and sensibility that is convincingly Latin American. . . . A powerful read.”—Wall Street Journal

“What can I say about this novel? That it’s extraordinary, electric, heartbreaking, profound? There aren’t enough adjectives to describe how moved I was by the story of Ladydi and her friends, of their tragic lives and quiet fortitude in spite of a world that conspires against them. Maybe it’s enough just to say this: Prayers for the Stolen is the best book I’ve read in years.”—Cristina Henríquez, author of The World in Half

“The author builds a powerful narrative whose images re-create an alarming reality that not everyone has dared to address but that everyone has definitely heard.”—El Paso Times

“Compelling . . . just beautiful.”—Diane Rehm, NPR

“With Ladydi, Jennifer Clement has created a feisty teenage heroine who is an unforgettable character.”—Good Housekeeping

“The theme of Prayers for the Stolen is the wanton violence inflicted on women and the destruction of communities as a result of the drug trade in Mexico, but Clement’s eye for the revealing detail, the simple poetry of her language, and the visceral authenticity of her characters turn that deadening reality into a compelling, tragically beautiful novel.”—Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

“Highly original . . . [Clement’s] prose is poetic in the true sense: precise as a scalpel, lyrical without being indulgent.”—The Guardian

“What a marvelous writer Clement is. . . . [With] power in a prose that is simple and simply beguiling.”—The Scotsman

“Bold and innovative . . . The rich mixture of the outlandishly real and the hyperfabulistic has a certain superstitious power over the reader. Jennifer Clement employs poetry’s ability to mirror thought. . . . Superbly drawn.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“The most enchanting journey I’ve taken in a long, long time, and the most important. Prayers For The Stolen is a hand-guided tour through a ruthless true corner of our century, with characters so alive they will burrow into your heart. Stunningly written, magically detailed, you see, smell and taste the action on every page, feel every foible, and miss the candor of these funny, achingly human voices long after you put them down. As the heroine herself might say: not something to read but to lick off a plate.”—DBC Pierre, Booker Prize–winning author of Vernon God Little

About the Author

Jennifer Clement is the author of multiple books, including Widow Basquiat and Gun Love. She was awarded the NEA Fellowship for Literature and the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award for Prayers for the Stolen. The president of PEN International, she currently lives in Mexico City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Now we make you ugly, my mother said. She whistled. Her mouth was so close she sprayed my neck with her whistle-spit. I could smell beer. In the mirror I watched her move the piece of charcoal across my face. It's a nasty life, she whispered.

It's my first memory. She held an old cracked mirror to my face. I must have been about five years old. The crack made my face look as if it had been broken into two pieces. The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.

My name is Ladydi Garcia Martínez and I have brown skin, brown eyes, and brown frizzy hair, and look like everyone else I know. As a child my mother used to dress me up as a boy and call me Boy.

I told everyone a boy was born, she said.

If I were a girl then I would be stolen. All the drug traffickers had to do was hear that there was a pretty girl around and they'd sweep onto our lands in black Escalades and carry the girl off.

On television I watched girls getting pretty, combing their hair and braiding it with pink bows or wearing makeup, but this never happened in my house.

Maybe I need to knock out your teeth, my mother said.

As I grew older I rubbed a yellow or black marker over the white enamel so that my teeth looked rotten.

There is nothing more disgusting than a dirty mouth, Mother said.

It was Paula's mother who had the idea of digging the holes. She lived across from us and had her own small house and field of papaya trees.

My mother said that the state of Guerrero was turning into a rabbit warren with young girls hiding all over the place.

As soon as someone heard the sound of an SUV approaching, or saw a black dot in the distance or two or three black dots, all girls ran to the holes.

This was in the state of Guerrero. A hot land of rubber plants, snakes, iguanas, and scorpions, the blond, transparent scorpions, which were hard to see and that kill. Guerrero had more spiders than any place in the world we were sure, and ants. Red ants that made our arms swell up and look like a leg.

This is where we are proud to be the angriest and meanest people in the world, Mother said.

When I was born, my mother announced to her neighbors and people in the market that a boy had been born.

Thank God a boy was born! she said.

Yes, thank God and the Virgin Mary, everyone answered even though no one was fooled. On our mountain only boys were born, and some of them turned into girls around the age of eleven. Then these boys had to turn into ugly girls who sometimes had to hide in holes in the ground.

We were like rabbits that hid when there was a hungry stray dog in the field, a dog that cannot close his mouth, and its tongue already tastes their fur. A rabbit stomps its back leg and this danger warning travels through the ground and alerts the other rabbits in the warren. In our area a warning was impossible since we all lived scattered and too far apart from each other. We were always on the lookout, though, and tried to learn to hear things that were very far away. My mother would bend her head down, close her eyes and concentrate on listening for an engine or the disturbed sounds that birds and small animals made when a car approached.

No one had ever come back. Every girl who had been stolen never returned or even sent a letter, my mother said, not even a letter. Every girl, except for Paula. She came back one year after she'd been taken.

From her mother, over and over again, we heard how she had been stolen. Then one day Paula walked back home. She had seven earrings that climbed up the cupped edge of her left ear in a straight line of blue, yellow, and green studs and a tattoo that snaked around her wrist with the words Cannibal's Baby.

Paula just walked down the highway and up the dirt path to her house. She walked slowly, looking down, as if she were following a row of stones straight to her home.

No, my mother said. She was not following stones, that girl just smelled her way home to her mother.

Paula went into her room and lay down in her bed that was still covered with a few stuffed animals. Paula never spoke a word about what had happened to her. What we knew was that Paula's mother fed her from a bottle, gave her a milk bottle, actually sat her on her lap and gave her a baby bottle. Paula was fifteen then because I was fourteen. Her mother also bought her Gerber baby foods and fed her straight into her mouth with a small white plastic spoon from a coffee she bought at the OXXO shop at the gas station that was across the highway.

Did you see that? Did you see Paula's tattoo? my mother said.

Yes. Why?

You know what that means, right? She belongs. Jesus, Mary's son and Son of God, and the angels in heaven protect us all.

No, I didn't know what that meant. My mother did not want to say, but I found out later. I wondered how did someone get stolen from a small hut on a mountain by a drug trafficker, with a shaved head and a machine gun in one hand and a gray grenade in his back pocket, and end up being sold like a package of ground beef?

I watched out for Paula. I wanted to talk to her. She never left her house now but we had always been best friends, along with Maria and Estefani. I wanted to make her laugh and remember how we used to go to church on Sundays dressed up like boys and that my name had been Boy and her name had been Paulo. I wanted to remind her of the times we used to look at the soap opera magazines together because she loved to look at the pretty clothes the television stars wore. I also wanted to know what had happened.

What everyone did know was that she had always been the prettiest girl in these parts of Guerrero. People said Paula was even prettier than the girls from Acapulco, which was a big compliment, as anything that was glamorous or special had to come from Acapulco. So the word was out.

Paula's mother dressed her in dresses stuffed with rags to make her look fat but everyone knew that less than one hour from the port of Acapulco, there was a girl living on a small property with her mother and three chickens who was more beautiful than Jennifer Lopez. It was just a matter of time. Even though Paula's mother thought up the idea of hiding girls in holes in the ground, which we all did, she was not able to save her own daughter.

One year before Paula was stolen, there had been a warning.

It was early in the morning when it happened. Paula's mother, Concha, was feeding old tortillas to her three chickens when she heard the sound of an engine down the road. Paula was still in bed fast asleep. She was in bed with her face washed clean, her hair roped into a long black braid that, during the night sleep, had coiled around her neck.

Paula was wearing an old T-shirt. It hung down below her knees, was made of white cotton, and said the words Wonder Bread across the front in dark blue letters. She was also wearing a pair of pink panties, which my mother always said was worse than being naked!

Paula was deeply asleep when the narco barged into the house.

Concha said she'd been feeding the chickens, those three good-for-nothing chickens that had never laid an egg in all their lives, when she saw the tan-colored BMW coming up the narrow dirt path. For a second she thought it was a bull or some animal that had run away from the Acapulco zoo because she had not expected to see a light brown vehicle coming toward her.

When she'd thought of narcos coming, she always imagined the black SUVs with tinted windows, which were supposed to be illegal but everyone had them fixed so the cops could not look inside. Those black Cadillac Escalades with four doors and black windows filled with narcos and machine guns were like the Trojan Horse, or so my mother used to say.

How did my mother know about Troy? How did a Mexican woman living all alone with one daughter in the Guerrero countryside, less than an hour from Acapulco by car and four hours by mule, know anything about Troy? It was simple. The one and only thing my father ever bought her when he came back from the United States was a small satellite dish antenna. My mother was addicted to historical documentaries and to Oprah's talk shows. In my house there was an altar to Oprah beside the one she had for the Virgin of Guadalupe. My mother did not call her Oprah. That is a name she never figured out. My mother called her Opera. So it was Opera this and Opera that.

In addition to documentaries and Oprah, we must have watched The Sound of Music at least a hundred times. My mother was always on the lookout to see when the movie would be programmed on a movie channel.

Every time Concha would tell us what had happened to Paula, the story was different. So we never knew the truth.

The drug trafficker who went to the house before Paula was stolen, only went to get a good look at her. He went to see if the rumors were true. They were true.

It was different when Paula was stolen.

On our mountain, there were no men. It was like living where there were no trees.

It is like being a person with one arm, my mother said. No, no, no, she corrected herself. Being in a place without men is like being asleep without dreams.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (November 4, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 080413880X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0804138802
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ HL800L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.32 x 0.57 x 8.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #259,145 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,145 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- #3,392 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #15,227 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.3 1,288 ratings

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Jennifer Clement

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Jennifer Clement is President Emerita of the human rights and freedom of expression organization PEN International and the only woman to hold the office of President (2015-2021) since the organization was founded in 1921. Under her leadership, the groundbreaking PEN International Women’s Manifesto and The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto were created. As President of PEN Mexico (2009-2012), Clement was instrumental in changing the law to make the crime of killing a journalist a federal crime.

Clement is author of the novels A True Story Based on Lies, The Poison That Fascinates, Prayers for the Stolen, Gun Love and Stormy People as well as several poetry books including Poems and Errors, published by Kaunitz-Olsson in Sweden. Clement also wrote the acclaimed memoir Widow Basquiat on New York City in the early 1980’s and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, which NPR named best book of 2015 in seven different categories. Her memoir The Promised Party will be published in early 2024. Clement’s books have been translated into 38 languages and have covered topics such as the stealing of little girls in Mexico, the effects of gun violence and trafficking of guns into Mexico and Central America as well as writing about her life in the art worlds of Mexico and New York.

Clement is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, MacDowell and Santa Maddalena Fellowships and her books have twice been a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book. Prayers for the Stolen was the recipient of the Grand Prix des Lectrices Lyceenes de ELLE(sponsored by ELLE Magazine, the French Ministry of Education and the Maison des écrivains et de la littérature) and a New Statesman Book of the Year, picked by the Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Gun Love was an Oprah Book Club Selection as well as being a National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize finalist. Time magazine, among other publications, named it one of the top 10 books of 2018. At NYU she was the commencement speaker for the Gallatin graduates of 2017 and she gave the Lectio Magistralis in Florence, Italy for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. Clement is a member of Mexico’s prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

For Clement’s work in human rights, she was awarded the HIP Award for contribution to Latino Communities by the Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP) Organization as well as being the recipient of the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award. Most recently, she was given the 2023 Freedom of Expression Honorary title on the occasion of World Press Day by Brussels University Alliance VUB and ULB in partnership with the European Commission, European Endowment for Democracy and UNESCO among others. Other laureates include Svetlana Alexievich, Zhang Zhan, Ahmet Altan, Daphne Caruana Galizia and Raif Badawi, among others.

Jennifer Clement was raised in Mexico where she lives. She and her sister Barbara Sibley founded and direct the San Miguel Poetry Week. Clement has a double major in anthropology and English Literature from New York University (Gallatin) and an MFA from University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast). She was named a Distinguished Alumna by the Kingswood Cranbrook School.

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Beverly Brown Ruggia

Excellent Novel

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2014

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Prayers for the Stolen is excellent! It is beautifully written and is a heart wrenching expose of one of the most brutal aspects of the rampant and powerful drug trade in Mexico. But the book does not take you through a graphic Tarantino tour of the horrors implicit in the story. Instead, Clement manages to focus on the endurance and resilience of the women who face unspeakable abuse and trauma. We can imagine but do not relive the terror. We see the before and after, the anticipation of and the recovering from. The facts are harrowing, but the telling of the story is not.

The main characters live under the constant threat of violence. They are invisible to the world, living in remote and very poor regions of Mexico where the narco-traffickers rule. The setting is Mad Max desolate, terrifying and hopeless. But the drama is not loud. It does not harangue. It is muted and the language and voices are of the land, rustic, raw and unadorned.

The novel gets inside the "collateral damage" space of global social and political upheaval. The victims live in NAFTA's wake, abandoned mostly by men gone off to the US to work, but who, in the "va y ven" of it all, end up never coming back. They live in the dusty shoulders of the Meso American narco- highway. Young women are randomly killed, maimed or "stolen" from their homes when the speeding SUVs veer off their beaten path so the traffickers can go foraging for pretty girls. The girls are not "kidnapped" in the traditional sense, as there is no ransom to be had. They are abducted or "stolen" for the purpose being sold into prostitution or used as personal pleasure toys.

As always, Jennifer Clement has written the reader into a very quiet and internal place. Seated at the hearth or at the table we are immersed in a contemporary update of the quotidian details of an ancient culture. Lady Diana worship, Rap and Hip Hop and cell phones are as central to life as the Virgin de Guadalupe,scorpions, chiles and tortillas.

Prayers for the Stolen is an intimate look at poverty and human trafficking in Mexico from the inside out. But it also draws the global context that connects us from the outside in. This novel does not allow us to escape from our relationship to or our responsibility in the story.
Bravo!

4 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Heartbreaking and real

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2022

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Well-written. The story and the characters are well defined and visible. Fiction, based in the current day reality of the drug trafficking, disappearing girls, and the subtle ways that the U.S. contributes to the ongoing crisis. The ending is a little weak. If not for that, i would have given it a five star.

One person found this helpful

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Roger DeBlanck

Jarring and Eye-Opening

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2014

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The book jacket description of Prayers for the Stolen hit me with an overwhelming compulsion to want to read this novel about the lives of young girls abducted by the Mexican drug cartels. At the outset of the narrative, the plot is a tad slow in developing and also jumpy in its chronology. However, something alarmingly powerful can be detected pushing through the sketchiness of the early chapters. Once the characters are established and the story reveals enough information to see the extreme difficulty of life in the small mountain town of Guerrero, the narrative becomes entirely mesmerizing and gains unstoppable momentum that did not free me from the page.

The novel’s remarkable narrator and heroine is Ladydi Garcia Martinez. Along with the other unfortunate girls and their families, Ladydi faces terrifying hardships in a story that delivers on all levels of humanity. It is harrowing and sorrowful to experience the realism of how their lives are completely destroyed by the organized crime of the cartels. As this novel continues to unleash its power, the sparseness of the prose slowly begins to embellish and become outright profound with its imagery and beauty. The story generates great compassion with its examination of the adversity endured by mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and family and friends. Even with all the pain and horror the story confronts, it is ultimately a book about survival and hope. You will hardly experience a reality that is more jarring and eye-opening than the one Jennifer Clement allows us to enter in Prayers for the Stolen.

3 people found this helpful

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Wendy Ann Grant

Interesting story, hard to swallow the concept

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2015

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At first the writing style was a little bit choppy and it was hard to understand what was happening but then it got better as it went on and I didn't want to put it down. The story line overall wasn't an easy one to take in considering that such things actually still happen today. But being told from a teenagers perspective made it more interesting for me because doing so made it that much more interesting; although that much more sadder as well considering that is no lifestyle for any woman, never mind to such young girls.

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2017

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I didn't LOVE this book, but I really liked it and learned a lot from it. It filled me with so many different emotions as I was reading it. Some of the questions that I had as I read weren't exactly answered clearly for me in the story. I certainly can make inferences, but some things I just needed the author of the story to "tell me!"
It was a book club choice and we had a great discussion over the book. The subject of trafficking young girls is certainly predominant in our world today. Scary and frustrating. I enjoyed the read and learned from it.

3 people found this helpful

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Justino Palazuelos

This is a fantastic novel. The book has been touted as a ...

Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2014

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This is a fantastic novel. The book has been touted as a portrayal of the hardships of the women involved in the sex trade. However, in my opinion, that is really a subtext and a background for a much deeper story about the strength of a woman that against all odds manages to grow as a person despite the difficulties of her life. I live in Mexico and see stories like these all the time. These stories have a numbing effect on people; even so, I still felt my heart jump several times as I read this novel. The language was brutally beautiful, and it carried a certain magic that at times reminded me of García Márquez or Isabel Allende.

For those who do not know Mexico, this book will immerse you into one of the darker parts of the country's soul. I promise you, the book will not leave you unchanged. The question is, can you take it?

15 people found this helpful

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Charlene McDonald

Highly recommend.

Reviewed in Mexico on December 14, 2019

Verified Purchase

Fantastic book. I live in Mexico now and this story rings true. Shocking. Moving. Frightening. One of those books that sticks with you and you keep thinking about long after you put it down. Highly recommend.

One person found this helpful

Xti H.

Lecturas del curso.

Reviewed in Spain on April 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

Libro difícil de encontrar, en según qué versión.
Sus páginas tienen un buen tacto y su portada colorida, llama la atención. Me lo han pedido para una clase de inglés( así que no comento el texto)
El tamaño de la letra está muy bien, para poder leer, sin esfuerzo.

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Sonyasparkles

Stolen

Reviewed in Australia on July 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Where has humanity gone wrong...Prayers for the Stolen , Memory Stones about the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina.... whilst it’s fiction, it’s not far from the horrible truth.

Darlene Jones

Amazing

Reviewed in Canada on November 14, 2014

Verified Purchase

How Jennifer managed to capture the essence of life for the poor in Mexico is to be admired. I've spent enough time in Mexico--not as a tourist--to know that her portrayal is spot on. A beautifully written and heart wrenching story. You'll finish it and immediately want to read it again. I'

One person found this helpful

Isabell S.

tolles Buch

Reviewed in Germany on October 19, 2015

Verified Purchase

Ich habe das Buch mit meinem englischsprachigen Buch-Club gelesen und finde es sehr beeindruckend, allerdings in der Originalversion und nicht übersetzt.

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