Reservoir Bitches

Reservoir Bitches is a blisteringly urgent collection of interconnected stories about contemporary Mexican women. It absolutely bangs from the first page to the last. It’s extremely funny but deadly serious and we loved the energy and flair of the dual translators’ approach. It packs an enormous political and linguistic punch but is also subtle, revelatory and moving about the ways in which these women hustle, innovate, survive or don’t, in a world of labyrinthine dangers. This book weaves the riotous testimony of the living and the dead to create an expletive-rich feminist blast of Mexican literature. 
 

Barry Pierce, Big Issue

‘Praise must be heaped upon the translators, Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary, who borrow from London street slang to approximate De La Verda’s Mexican street slang, effectively allowing this translation to flow and sing in English. Reservoir Bitches doesn’t shy from portraying Mexico’s gritty underbelly but, much like her fellow countrywoman Fernanda Melchor, De La Verda’s stories scrutinise Mexican society with great humour. It is a remarkably good debut collection.’

Britta Stromeyer, Necessary Fiction

‘With sharp social criticism and sardonic humor, de la Cerda balances brutality with compelling portrayals of characters whom readers may otherwise be tempted to condemn. While the author’s casual language and profanity may distract some readers, her alluring style creates space for her complex themes to unfold, solidifying Reservoir Bitches as a work of narrative art and a powerful testament to diverse experiences and stories that deserve to be heard.’

Caroline Tracey, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Where the book can fail to paint complete portraits of its characters, however, Sanches and Cleary’s translation manages impressively to enrich them. In Spanish, some readers critiqued de la Cerda’s narrators for speaking in a caricature of Sinaloan regional style. But the translators’ rendering of the characters’ brassy and slang-filled voices is pitch-perfect: they find English phrases and words that reflect the Spanish attitude and profanity, but they never sacrifice sentence structure to do so; they translate the characters’ modes of speaking, rather than treating their speech as a collection of idioms.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘[de la Cerda’s] tactics succeed in creating the enchanting feeling that one is sitting across from each narrator, being told their stories as a close confidante […] The author’s demand that we bear witness to the senseless murders, in all their gruesomeness, of these bright young women is sobering and commendable.’

Publishers Weekly

‘While the circumstances of each narrator vary—some are obscenely rich while others are grindingly poor—their blasé way of speaking, in-your-face sexuality, and violence start to blur together. Nonetheless, de la Cerda offers a refreshingly unapologetic voice for women who refuse to be placated. This is worth a look.’ 

‘My book is about women in Mexico who survive in violent contexts such as the narco-sphere and do whatever they can with what they have to stay alive. I was inspired by the highly complex Mexican context, where everyone is both a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. In the face of violence, we do what we must to survive, which often falls into morally grey areas.’

Read the full interview here.

‘We divided up the stories first, each translated a batch and then did an edit on the other’s stories. Finally, we workshopped them all together. For later passes, we edited the whole collection straight through in order, together. By the end of the second pass, we sent our remaining queries to Dahlia, who answered our questions and also shared the Italian translator’s queries for our reference (there was some overlap, but our questions were mostly really different, which was interesting to see). Since each story is told from a different character’s perspective, across a wide range of demographics, one challenge was making each voice distinct, and creating a colloquial language in English that echoed the linguistic vitality of the original. In terms of inspirations, because music plays such an integral part in the narrative, we listened to the songs referenced in the stories many times and watched the music videos, more for pleasure than anything else.’

Read the full interview here.