Told from the Hips

I received a copy of Told From The Hips by Andrea Amosson from its publishers, Nowadays Orange Productions, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review. This collection of ten short stories and vignettes is mostly set in Chile or features people emigrating to or from the country. The tales centre around strong women or women whose situations bring out their inner strength and I found it a remarkably inspirational and uplifting book to read, despite the dark turns of some of the stories.

We visit Copenhagen with a young Chilean woman whose ex-pat aunt and uncle now life in the city. Effectively exiled from their homeland, the aunt and uncle make weekly cycle rides to a flea market. Their niece is underwhelmed by the trip until she realises that this is the closest her relations have to a remembrance of home. Then, in Cover Story, a different young woman is so excited to have landed her ideal journalism job and had her first article printed in the newspaper. She learns the hard way that not all women believe in sisterhood though as her dreams are spitefully ripped away.

Ananuca and Chachacoma are a particularly moving pair of stories about an orphan who never knew her mother and the mother who was given away in marriage for the price of a few animals, losing her baby daughter 'to the city' during a particularly harsh winter. I loved the imagery of this story and that of The Blood And The Escape where Teresa, declared insane, walks barefoot to a railway station to escape imprisonment in a nunnery, but cannot steel herself to leave her daughter behind with 'the lump', her husband. In common with the final three stories, Octavia who is lost to gypsies, Marcelita's Amusement where a slow-witted girl decides to entrap a husband, and Suan who is born to a Chinese immigrant woman, simple effective prose and beautifully evoked characters make these the kind of tales that are good at face-value and become greater with pondering. The women and girls are real with easily relatable problems that are repeated the world over so, while there is a Chilean flavour to the writing, in many ways these stories could be told of women in many different countries. The whole collection is short and I easily read it in a couple of hours, but then returned the next day to read it again to make sure I had picked up on all the details and emotions.