Prayers for the Stolen
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
“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.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
Jennifer Clement. (2014). Prayers for the Stolen. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jennifer Clement. 2014. Prayers for the Stolen. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jennifer Clement, Prayers for the Stolen. Random House Publishing Group, 2014.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jennifer Clement. Prayers for the Stolen. Random House Publishing Group, 2014.
Library | Owned | Available |
---|---|---|
Shared Digital Collection | 2 | 1 |
OverDrive Product Record
- sortTitle
- Prayers for the Stolen
- crossRefId
- 1381687
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/44B/02F/48/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/44B/02F/48/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780804138796
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B00EMXBDKW
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780804138796
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Jennifer Clement
- id
- 44b02f48-0bb9-4d42-a7af-43140721fa5a
- title
- Prayers for the Stolen
- starRating
- 4
- dateAdded
- 2014-03-24T12:21:00-04:00
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=1381687
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- fileName: PrayersfortheStolen_9780804138796_1381687
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 4674774
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780804138796
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 2/11/2014
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/prayers-for-the-44b02f?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: PrayersfortheStolen_1381687
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- type: ASIN
- value: B00EMXBDKW
- name: Kindle Book
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-kindle
- onSaleDate: 2/11/2014
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/prayers-for-the-44b02f?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: PrayersfortheStolen_9780804138796_1381687
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780804138796
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 233835
- name: OverDrive Read
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 2/11/2014
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/prayers-for-the-44b02f?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- keywords
- value: AIDS
- value: Friendship
- value: kidnap
- value: Hispanic
- value: Mexico
- value: prayer
- value: drug trafficking
- value: pray
- value: Acapulco
- value: Mexican
- value: kidnapping
- value: Prison
- value: cartel
- value: Addiction
- value: crime
- value: drug
- value: mothers
- value: Coming of age
- value: Mexican Mafia
- value: revenge
- value: alcohol
- value: trafficking
- value: Oprah
- value: Poverty
- value: survival
- value: kidnapped
- value: marijuana
- value: Princess Diana
- value: latino
- value: sex trafficking
- value: human trafficking
- value: community
- value: abduction
- value: abducted
- value: tragedy
- value: drugs
- value: mother daughter
- value: latino fiction
- value: mexican cartel
- value: hispanic literature
- value: Hispanic American fiction
- value: hispanic books
- value: the sound of music
- value: drug book
- value: mexican gifts
- value: mexico life
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Clement, Jennifer
- bioText: 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.
- name: Jennifer Clement
- imprint
- Hogarth
- publishDate
- 2014-02-11T00:00:00-05:00
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- Prayers for the Stolen
- fullDescription
- 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. - gradeLevels
- value: Grade 3
- value: Grade 4
- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Francisco Goldman, New York Times Book Review
- content: "Beguiling, and even crazily enchanting... [Clement] writes a poet's prose, spare and simple, creating her world through patterns of repeated and varied metaphors and images that blossom inside the reader like radiant poppies...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. The novel is an ebullient yet deeply stirring paean to its female characters' resiliency and capacity for loyalty, friendship, compassion and love, but also to the power of fiction and poetry."
- premium: False
- source: Diane Rehm, NPR
- content: "Compelling...Just beautiful...Really, really beautiful."
- premium: False
- source: Sunday Express
- content: "Beautifully written...Clement's prose is luminous and startlingly original. The sentences are spare and stripped back, but brilliantly manage to contain complex characters and intense emotional histories in a few vividly poetic words. Her portrayal of modern Mexico is heartbreaking; a dangerous and damaging environment for women, but her portrait of Ladydi and her refusal to be one of the lost girls is defiantly bold and bravely uncompromising"
- premium: False
- source: Metro
- content: "Ladydi's irreverent voice sings off the page and there are laughs to be had as she relates her mother's drunken wisdom and seeks to find a way to live"
- premium: False
- source: Psychologies
- content: "Despite its violent premise, this is a darkly comic read with one of the funniest, most touching narrators in years, highlighting a very real issue in a remarkably fresh way. An inspiring story of female resilience"
- premium: False
- source: Good Housekeeping
- content: "With Ladydi, Jennifer Clement has created a feisty teenage heroine who is an unforgettable character"
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
November 25, 2013
The first novel from the American-born but Mexico-based Clement, president of PEN Mexico, to be published in the U.S. is an expose of the hideously dangerous lives girls lead in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Despite its social significance, the book doesn’t read like homework; Clement is more a poet than a documentarian, and the girls and women of the village she chronicles are complex individuals. Ladydi, named after Princess Diana, spends her childhood dressed as a boy, as do all the girls from her village, since they will otherwise be kidnapped and forced into prostitution or drug smuggling. Most of the men from Ladydi’s village left a long time ago. The community is shocked when one kidnapped girl—the transcendently beautiful, now near-catatonic Paula—manages to return. Ladydi, thinking to save herself from Paula’s fate, decides to accept an offer of work from Mike, her best friend Maria’s brother, as a nanny in Acapulco, where, as he tells her, “people are rich, rich, rich.” However, Ladydi soon discovers that in a corrupt system, any apparent opportunity comes with hidden traps. Clement treats the brutal material honestly but not sensationally, conveying the harshest moments secondhand rather than directly, and ultimately allows Ladydi to continue to hope. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
December 1, 2013
A young girl struggles to survive under the desolate but terrifying umbrella of the Mexican drug wars. It wouldn't be incorrect to call this a novel of collateral damage. We hear all the time about the executions and decapitations of the bloody wars in Mexico, not to mention the endless contest over immigration reform as desperate men cross the United States border daily, running either to or from something. But what happens to those poor souls left behind? That's the premise behind this spare, almost noir novel by Mexico-based American poet Clement (The Poison That Fascinates, 2008, etc.) that tells the story of 13-year-old Ladydi Garcia Martinez, who lives in a small village in southwestern Mexico. Her home is very much a woman's world, made so because all the men have either fled to the United States to start new families, been kidnapped to work for the cartels or been murdered. It's a world where mothers bruise, maim or disguise their daughters to prevent them from being kidnapped and sold as human chattel. Ladydi's drunken mother contemplates knocking out her teeth, while Ladydi and her friends scramble to conceal themselves in holes in the ground as convoys rumble in. Ladydi's friend Paula, kidnapped, returns with tales of girls burning themselves with cigarettes to mark their corpses. "If we're found dead someplace everyone will know we were stolen. It is our mark. My cigarette burns are a message," says Paula. "You do want people to know it's you. Otherwise how will our mothers find us?" Eventually, Ladydi escapes to become a nanny for a rich couple in Acapulco, but a baseless misunderstanding lands her in a women's prison, where Ladydi must rely on her fellow inmates to retain her last vestiges of hope. Some thematic elements recall Clement's 2002 novel A True Story Based on Lies, but overall, this is a much richer and more durable tale. A stark portrait of women abused or abandoned by every side in an awful conflict.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from January 1, 2014
In Clement's powerful new novel, Ladydi Garcia Martinez tells the story of how she grew up in a remote Mexican mountain village disguised as a boy. This was to ensure that the marauding gangs of drug dealers believed that the village was populated solely by adult women and young boys. No men and absolutely no pretty young girls. It's a survival strategy that works only marginally well. When it doesn't work, well, it's bad. It seems as if these thugs are always lurking, always hovering over villages, always ready to kidnap young, lovely girls. Ironically, it is the lure of this gang life or the flimsy promise of making it in the U.S. that has induced the men of Ladydi's village to leave. And so her History Channeleducated mother does the best she can with whatever meager means are available to raise and protect her daughter in this tenuous, matriarchal culture. It is her mother's pliable morality that defines her character and in a paradoxical way arms Ladydi to survive in modern Mexico. Clement's deft first-person narrative style imbues authenticity to her depiction of a world turned upside down by drug cartels, police corruption, and American exploitation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
- popularity
- 221
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/44b02f48-0bb9-4d42-a7af-43140721fa5a/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- 44b02f48-0bb9-4d42-a7af-43140721fa5a
- starRating
- 4.2
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/44B/02F/48/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/44B/02F/48/{44B02F48-0BB9-4D42-A7AF-43140721FA5A}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- publishDateText
- 02/11/2014
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780804138789
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
- 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... - sortTitle
- Prayers for the Stolen
- lexileScore
- 800
- crossRefId
- 1381687
- publisher
- Random House Publishing Group
- bisacCodes
- code: FIC019000
- description: Fiction / Literary
- code: FIC043000
- description: Fiction / Coming of Age
- code: FIC056000
- description: FICTION / Hispanic & Latino / General