Reservoir Bitches: Stories
LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize
A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.
"Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth." In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.
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Community Reviews
There’s no easing into this book. From the very first story, rage became my dominant emotion. This book reminds you yet again that there’s not a damn thing in any of these stories that is new or unfamiliar. Swap the names, and it could be any one of the stories you’d find in the news by lunchtime on a regular Tuesday. And then you feel disgust, anger, sadness, and hopelessness, and you’re forced to move on and confront the next horrible story before eventually avoiding the news for a week or so because it’s become “too negative.” Not that some man did these things to some woman, and that’s why it’s in the news, but somehow it’s the news that has become too negative.
It’s all too normal and all too everyday. You want to stay angry, you want to scream, you want to believe that surely this should make us all, everyone, literally anyone, angry enough to change something. But after a while, all you feel is tired.
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