Cantoras

Product Information

As I said above, I was a bit wary about the author reading her own work as I’ve found that authors usually cannot achieve the same level of excellence compared to professional narrators. I have to admit that this is not the case, Ms. De Robertis nailed this narration. I’m sure she did some kind of voice coaching because all the five characters’ voices are distinctive and her performance of the ample range of emotions is as good as any narrator’s. It’s also an advantage that she can pronounce the Spanish terms as they should sound, and even though she never lived in Uruguay, she sounds like a native.

A lyrical, richly sensory novel about a group of renegade cantoras—slang for queer women—who claim a beach refuge during the worst years of the dictatorship in Uruguay, and beyond. Together they steal time from oppression of all kinds, unspooling the infinity of themselves. Pointedly relevant to our own dangerous age, Carolina De Robertis has gifted us a majestic work of song and imagination, a handbook to survival for us all.” —Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin They meet and attempt to create a safe place in an off-the-grid beach town, with mixed results - and we follow their growth, foibles, loves and heartbreaks, until, finally, the sort-of end of the Juntas. Fue una bendición leer la nueva novela de Carolina De Robertis, Cantoras. En esta era tóxica su voz es lo que necesitamos para regresar íntegros. Además de eso, ¡es una excelente lectura! Un regalo”.—Luis Alberto Urrea, autor de La casa de los ángeles rotosAnd, well, of course people wanted it over. But as oppressed and abused groups have been screaming, unheard, forever: “No Justice No Peace!” and not all of our 5 woman Family adjusted to the new politics, the new struggle, and her place in it, with a happily-ever-after. Tl;dr (aka my reading experience summed up in Spongebob gifs (because sometimes this guy expresses emotions better than I do)): Over the course of 35 years, De Robertis charts the fortunes of these women as they fall in and out of love and navigate the country’s tumultuous politics. That [Cantoras is] written in such lovely prose is an added bonus.” —Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed

I was drawn into their existence, their pasts and their present. I came to care about them and their well-being. Their trials emotionally wrenched me from comfort and their love and friendship gave me hope for them. It’s not a light read but it is engrossing and fast-paced. I’m left with an ache in my chest that, given the choice, I would choose again just to experience the beauty of this novel. Sweeping and utterly breathtaking. . . . De Robertis’s writing is reason aloneto read this book. Like her fierce characters, her words pry and pull at theessence of not only what it feels like to be thwarted, condemned or quarantinedbecause of your beliefs and identity, but also what it means to bea vulnerable yet empowered, infinitely beautiful and fully alive woman.”— San Francisco ChronicleUnfortunately, the author didn’t trust readers to do their own research and added “2013” (26 years later) and like Harry Potter, sometimes the way later stuff just is death to the previous well done denouement. Maybe the USA part of Ms. de Robertis felt her Norte Americana readers couldn’t take the sadness of the Latin American 1986 ending, but I wish she had left it there. It seemed, at times, that this was the only way the world would be remade as the heroes had dreamed: one woman holds another woman, and she in turn lifts the world." Cantorasis historical fiction at its best. A magical tale of women, love, political upheaval and the beautiful landscape of Uruguay, it is expansive in scope and daring in content.” —Karin Greenberg , Woodbury Magazine Of the five women, Flaca is the one to bring them together initially. She’s a butcher’s daughter, used to fairly physical work and not very feminine. She’s quite aware of her sexual orientation but given the era, the patriarchal society and the terror instilled by the recent ascendance of a military dictatorship, being queer is hidden. Romina, in her early 20s like Flaca, is a student and former lover, now best friend, of Flaca’s. Her brother has been detained and jailed for suspected dissidence which means she is marked by association and being discovered a lesbian is as dangerous as being a part of the resistance is. There is so much to this book that even reading it for the second time (and quite possibly having skimmed it for twenty times already), I still find new gems among the words. Listening made it almost impossible to miss the details—details that killed me a little inside, that made me want to claw at my heart, to scream and cry and crumple all at the same time, and details that put a content smile on my face, my heart relieved and happy for the characters. My love for the cantoras grew, shifted for some but stronger and deeper.

This book made me feel so deeply, so wholly, that it can’t not b initial thoughts): In my 22 years of being alive, I have never once cried over a piece of fiction until today. Carolina de Robertis has accomplished the impossible... Paz] hadn’t known air could taste like this, so wide, so open. Her body a welcome. Skin awake. The world was more than she had known, even if only for this instant, even if only in this place.

Media Reviews

Flaca (La Pilota), Romina, La Venus (because she is La Venus to me and never Anita), Paz, and Malena. They are the very definition of a found family. Over the years, their love for each other shifts and reforms, their dynamics fierce and strong. And their names. Whenever I read their names, my heart jumps as if I were reunited with long-lost friends. Perhaps I am. Over the course of the book, we grew to understand them like close friends, and there is something intimate about that. I feel especially connected to Paz for her introversion, love of both literature and physical exertions. Also maybe because she started out as a baby gay, stealing my heart. Cantoras is a stunning lullaby to revolution—and each woman in this novel sings it with a deep ferocity. Again and again, I was lifted, then gently set down again—either through tears, rage, or laughter. Days later, I am still inside this song of a story.”—Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author It feels like the five women in Cantoras have a ‘shared language’. They use euphemisms, like describing visiting their clandestine beach as “going to church”; they adapt masculine words into feminine ones; and they comment on words with dual meanings. Could you comment on this shared language in the book? The story opens with the five women—Flaca (21), Romina (22, Jewish), Anita/La Venus (27), Paz (16), and Malena (25)—traveling to Cabo Polonio from Montevideo for the first time in 1977. This beach, relatively untouched by the Uruguayan regime, becomes the cantoras’ refuge for years to come.