On the first page of Trabucco Zer\u00e1n\u2019s novel, the narrator, Estela Garc\u00eda, offers a deal to the people who may or may not be on the other side of a mirrored glass pane: \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you\u2019re going to let me out of here.\u201d Estela, it seems, is waiting to be interrogated in connection with the death of a girl, Julia, the daughter of a couple for whom Estela has worked as a housemaid for seven years. What follows is Estela\u2019s account of her time as a domestic, from her responding to a want ad\u2014\u201cHousemaid wanted, presentable, full time\u201d\u2014to her experience working for the couple, whom she refers to as \u201cthe se\u00f1or and se\u00f1ora.\u201d Estela clearly resents her bosses\u2014he\u2019s a doctor, she\u2019s a lawyer, and both are condescending snobs, chiding their employee for every oversight and expecting her to essentially raise Julia for them. Estela is painfully conscious of the class differences between her and the couple, and she disdains their family, \u201can unhappy little girl, a woman keeping up appearances and a man keeping count: of every minute, every peso, every conquest.\u201d Estela talks for more than 250 pages, eventually getting to the story of Julia\u2019s death, which is of course tragic but also (perhaps by design) anticlimactic. Trabucco Zer\u00e1n has crafted an interesting narrative setup, but she can\u2019t quite make it work\u2014Estela\u2019s frequent asides to her apparent interrogators (\u201cDid I tell you about this?\u201d \u201cDo you see what I\u2019m getting at?\u201d) quickly wears thin, and the suspense never really materializes. Her treatment of the theme of class differences is shallow, and the character development just isn\u2019t there. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the first page of Trabucco Zer\u00e1n\u2019s novel, the narrator, Estela Garc\u00eda, offers a deal to the people who may or may not be on the other side of a mirrored glass pane: \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you\u2019re going to let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}