Lady without Land

Winner of The 2023 George Garrett Fiction Prize, selected by Manuel Muñoz as seen here.

Lady without Land is a story told in fragments about señorita who feels lost in and lost without Los Angeles.

She uses classic literature and cocktail recipes to organize and populate bits and pieces of a life: growing up as a Mexican middle-class girl in a predominantly white suburb where neighbors labeled her family the “dirty” Mexicans; being bullied by an older sister on car rides from Los Angeles to Mexico, grappling with a father’s gambling addiction, and, later, his death; journeying on the continuous carousel of lovers the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have to offer.

A shaken and stirred abecedarian, a sloppy yet put-together künstlerroman, about charting one’s life path amid cultural pressures and the grip of the ever-present past, the book can be read forwards or backwards and, with any hope, completely out of sequence so that no reader can read this novel the same way twice.