This is a wonderful masterpiece of a novel. I loved following our four protagonists and their dysfunctional family. This was such a heavy, hard hitting book, and I will not forget the impact of this story.

Cousins by Aurora Venturini is a strange and candid work of translated fiction. It follows a dysfunctional family of women in Argentina as they experience abuse after abuse.

Yuna, our young narrator, observes the women in her family suffering these abuses, including miscarriages, illegal abortions, murder, and ableism. Nearly all of them have some form of a disability. Yuna struggles with articulating her thoughts and dreads using punctuation. She is an aspiring artist, but due to her disability, her family doesn’t take her seriously until a professor vouches for her.

This translated novel is such an unusual story that I nearly DNF’d it, but I’m glad I didn’t. The writing style and the voice of Yuna are considerably odd and took a minute to get used to. Initially, the writing is akin to stream of consciousness. But as Yuna matures and starts reading the dictionary, the writing style becomes more traditional.

The topics discussed are dark, but Yuna’s unique narration and innocence keep it from feeling completely bleak. However, there is a noticeable shift when she realizes the weight of the injustices befalling her cousins.

This novel is brutal and bizarre and not for the faint of heart.

Thank you to Soft Skull for providing an arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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I wanted to like this book, based on the synopsis but it is so poorly written with neither character nor plot development that I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it

It is amazing that this winner of Página/12’s New Novel Award in 2007 has not previously been translated to English. It is wonderful. (I suspect that there will be some who give it just one star or even do not finish it, but I found it quite amazing.)

Yuna, the narrator, is part of a poor family that, in addition to the poverty, suffers from a variety of genetic and mental disorders. She herself has a handicap, but she also has not insignificant skills as a painter. As she matures, she does what she can to aid and protect her severely disabled sister Betina and her cousins Carina and Petra.

Perhaps a typical sentence can tell you much: "I realize that I’m learning to criticize with scorn (idem) and will try to correct that tendency because it makes your soul ugly and gives you wrinkles on your forehead and I don’t want to have wrinkles on my Modigliano model’s face which I know is pretty from the compliments people say in the street which didn’t permeate before but now do and I should clarify that I should have put idem after permeate because as you know I get the difficult terms from the dictionary and until I am able to use them with absolute fidelity I won’t feel that they’re fully my property and forgive me if I’m boring you with all these explanations but I was born like this and I want to earn what I have honestly and not steal from anyone."

A recent English translation of Venturini's 2007 award winning novel. Touted as "darkly funny", truthfully, I found it to just be very dark. Following several women and their harrowing lives, I did not finish this one.