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truepenny
The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border by Teresa RodriguezMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book, published in 2007, is about the skyrocketing rate of murder against women in Ciudad Juarez starting in 1993 and the horrific corruption in the police, the government, and the judiciary that caused/enabled/obfuscated the murders.
It's not a great book. It's not Rodriguez's fault that her topic is open-ended (there hadn't been, as of 2007, a single conviction in any of the murders that wasn't dubious at best) or that it is mind-bogglingly complicated. However, the same things can be said of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark, which I'm listening to right now and which has the added burden of being UNFINISHED and yet is excellent. Rodriguez doesn't seem to have a strong enough sense of where she wants her story to be, with the victims' families, with the police corruption, with the overarching problem of violence against women being judged unimportant by the men in power. And, yes, her story can be all of those things, but it takes some serious chops to make that kind of shift in scale from micro to macro work, and Rodriguez is an okay writer, but not the kind of powerhouse she'd need to be to pull it off. Perhaps what was lacking was the person of the author. Both McNamara and Ann Rule (whose Green River Running Red is another extremely complicated story being told on multiple levels) include themselves in the story. This isn't always necessary, or even desirable, but it gives the reader a yardstick, a little human figure to scale that keeps the horrifying numbers from receding into that muffled middle ground between the personal and the historical. And Rodriguez's numbers ARE horrifying--even more horrifying is that nobody really knows what the numbers ARE. Maybe it's that Rodriguez, after her Preface and Introduction, both of which promise a kind of sensibility that the book itself does not have, effaces her subject-position, which makes it feel, to me, like the book doesn't have any backbone--not in the sense of courage, but in the sense of a structure to hang its bones on.
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