Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Woman of Light is a Western novel—it cares deeply about the landscape. The terrain of the Lost Territory teems with life, even as settling pioneers call it empty. The cold mountains and expansive plains of Colorado serve as stand-ins for the harsh realities Luz endures. No land can be truly conquered. No people can be truly conquered either. Not as long as their stories, and their memories, endure.

Woman of Light is an intimate and intensely moving story of a Latinx and Indigenous family in the American West. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s lyrical, unpretentious prose renders the generations of women of this story in all of their complexity, offering a nuanced perspective on how the past can inform the future. Once again, Fajardo-Anstine proves she is a formidable, necessary voice in fiction.

With a single phrase, a single line of dialogue, a single description, Fajardo-Anstine has the power to accurately express the joy and sadness in a person’s life, their history, and how the world comes into contact with us, and how we come into contact with the world. The combination of a composed style and a passionate world view underlying all of her work is truly wonderful. It’s captivating. Fajardo-Anstine is a special author to me.

This indelible novel shines its big light on the Lopez family so brightly that I could draw a map of their breath. An absolutely glorious novel.

This is a rare and wondrous kind of novel that assembles the universe from mere words, whose unforgettable characters haunt like long shadows in the southwestern light.

Pure, simple, and luminescent. There are no other words to describe Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Woman of Light, a brilliant conflagration of a story that opens the eyes and inflames the heart.

A cinematic, epic story. Kali Fajardo-Anstine brings her keen understanding of desire, vulnerability, and destiny to this gorgeous reclaiming of lost history.

Fajardo-Anstine’s storytelling is absolutely engrossing.

A transporting story of the importance of family history told in a luminescent style.

Sensory-rich details… A lush, immersive historical novel.

An entrancing book about the stories we carry, the ones we need to keep telling. Fajardo-Anstine has given us another stunning cast of characters to root for.

A novel with vast reach.

A classic legendary Latinx story and a punch that says she can square up with any contemporary writer. Quite literally—Fajardo-Anstine can do both, she can do it all.

Wildly entertaining…a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters.

Sabrina & Corina isn’t just good, it’s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth.

[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters.

Fierce and essential stories . . . Feminine agency, legacy and kinship . . . govern the hearts of every character in this book.

A terrific collection of stories—fiercely and beautifully made.

Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart, believable in everything they said and did. How tragic that American letters hasn’t met these women of the West before, women who were here before America was America. And how tragic that these working-class women haven’t seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring their lives, Kali. I welcome them and you.

In the eleven stories of Sabrina & Corina, Fajardo-Anstine writes a love letter to the Chicanas of her homeland—women as unbreakable as the mountains that run through Colorado and as resilient as the arid deserts that surround it. . . . In her fierce, bold stories, these women—and she—are seen, and heard, and made known; the collection is both a product of pain and a celebration of survival. . . . Like the woman on Sabrina & Corina’s cover, the hearts of these characters are exposed but intact. Fajardo-Anstine’s heart is there on the page, too, beating with the blood of her ancestors.

Sabrina & Corina summons a world we hardly recognize, but should. . . . Fajardo-Anstine can make a story smell of sickness. She can make legend of malediction. Conjuring the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and unfurling the Denver skyline, there is no limit to what Fajardo-Anstine can manifest on paper and, subsequently, in our dreams. Yet, what is most admirable is the courage of her hand. She’s unafraid to delve into areas of race, feminism, queerness, and class. She interrogates whiteness, and its associations like passing and colorism, prodding unapologetically.

[A] beautiful collection.

[An] engrossing collection of tales . . . Stories that bravely reinvent the Wild West narrative by lifting up Latinx women and portraying callused hand cowboys not as heroes, but as villains and perpetrators of violence.

You will clutch your heart reading Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection. Her stories are that heartbreaking, each one like a gift from a small child, offered with earnest, luminous eyes, innocence itself, impossible to reject. . . . Go find yourself a copy of this thrilling, touching, beautiful book.

In [Sabrina & Corina] we find a different narrative of the West. These are women who inhabit a space between the Indigenous and the Latinx; they are fierce [and] powerful in their own way.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine writes about hard truths in women’s lives so knowingly, and with such a deft touch, I felt hyper-alert, as well as implicated and imperiled. The book is about belief, coping, yearning, and proceeding in spite of adversity (that is, the times we stay alive). The final act of the first story tells us everything we need to know about what territory we’ll be entering: In these achingly convincing stories, the writer is writing delicately, symbolically, about mortality itself.