By the time she was 12, Ámbar Mondragón knew how you can deal with bullet wounds. When she turned 13, her father, Victor, gave her a sawed-off shotgun plus capturing and hot-wiring classes. And as Nicolás Ferraro’s My Favorite Scar opens, 15-year-old Ámbar is tending to her father’s newest damage: He’s returned from an evening out with a bullet gap in his higher chest and his murdered pal Giovanni’s physique within the passenger seat of his automobile.
To Ámbar, this horrifying flip of occasions isn’t all that surprising. Rather, it’s simply one other horrible second within the life she’s lived for the reason that age of 9, when Grandma Nuria, who cared for Ámbar after her mom deserted her, had a deadly coronary heart assault. Dad got here to get her, and Ámbar since adjusted to an existence rife with violence and loneliness, one the place she wonders if she’ll ever really feel pleased or safe. After all, whereas the titular “favorite scar” refers to Dad’s tattoo bearing her identify, “He might carry my name on his skin, but he never held me in his arms. He chose my name, but he was never around until he didn’t have any other choice.”
Now, Ámbar has to tag alongside as Dad embarks on a singularly vicious highway journey, decided to precise bloody revenge on those that betrayed him and Giovanni. My Favorite Scar is a nihilistic highway novel of unrelenting bleakness that takes readers on a hair-raising tour of Argentina’s prison underworld. The duo cease at bars, burial websites and hideout shacks the place Dad delivers interrogations, warnings and beatings as Ámbar performs lookout or getaway driver, typically with sawed-off shotgun in hand.
As in Cruz, his first novel translated into English, Ferraro explores the results of criminals’ decisions on youngsters who develop into unwitting and/or unwilling accomplices. His deftly created suspense builds with each mile pushed, each faux ID used, each drop of blood spilled. Will the cycle of violence ever finish? Will Ámbar ever be something however “what other people have left behind”? My Favorite Scar is a pitch-black coming-of-age story that reverberates with oft-poetically expressed ache and disappointment—and possibly, simply possibly, a touch of hope.
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