Cross-Stitch was a wonderfully written story. I liked the idea of needlework as a metaphor for the friendships throughout the novel. It was quiet but lovely.

This book broke my heart because it spoke to me so clearly. As I drift away from my college friends in my mid thirties, I couldn't help but see myself so clearly reflected on the pages of Cross-Stitch. This was a beautiful book with beautiful characters that I both wanted to stay together and to grow apart. Somehow Barrera made me feel all of those things in such few pages.

I don’t usually read the publisher’s blurb before I start a book, and I’m really glad I didn’t here. I like to go on a voyage of discovery; sometimes the blurb spoils it. Somewhere in the middle of this novel, I began to wonder about possible connections between two words: text, texture. Surely….? I went to Merriam-Webster online:

Text; from Anglo-French tiste, texte, from Medieval Latin textus, from Latin texture, context, from texere to weave.
Merriam-Webster

Weaving. A tapestry. That’s what Jazmina Barrera presents us with: a text woven from threads about the lives of three young women, about embroidery as text and language (the textural possibilities in it), and about the (feminist) history of embroidery, with vivid scenes about traditional Mexican embroidery. It’s incredibly beautifully done; as she intends, as she builds layer on layer, you start to see a picture emerge.

One of three friends has drowned. In her grief (and regret), Mila goes through her memories of their teenage years and friendship, and the last time she saw Citlali, on the friends’ trip to Paris. In one of the most powerful symbols in the book, Mila is embroidering with black thread on black fabric, a purely textural piece. It’s the focus of an achingly beautiful scene towards the end of the book, bringing the reader some closure for the heartbreak.

This is a novel for lovers of literary fiction, coming-of-age stories, and stories with complex women. It’s full of art history, and Barrera firmly locates the “women’s work” of embroidery in that history. In doing so, she’s created her own defiant work of subversive stitching. I’m powerfully inspired to continue mine.

Jazmina Barrera has handcrafted this literary fiction work stitching parts of the main character’s recollections of her embroidery experiences among her friends, their relationship through the years, and also, spotlighting the beauty of needlework.

I loved the simple use of language, the realistic characters, and all those literary hints included in this novel. Another thing I enjoyed was all those chunks essay-like about the art of cross-stitching that I found educational and fascinating.

The book was originally published in Spanish in 2021 and the English edition translated by Christina Macsweeney is going to be published on November 7th, 2023.

Thank you Two Lines Press and Netgalley for this e-arc.

Cross Stitch, by Jazmina Barrera, Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Thank you to Two Lines Press and NetGalley for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book.

This novel tells the story of three close girlfriends in modern, middle-class Mexico, from middle school to adulthood, and the different paths they take. The narrator, Mila, is a writer and new mother; Dalia is an academic; and Mila’s reminiscence of their friendship is prompted by the drowning death of the third, Citlali, who was working for a non-governmental environmentalist organization.

Mila goes through her old journals and photos to focus on two important events in their lives: the first, a mid-high school summer, when the three were part of an adult literacy program in a small village; the second on a trip to London and Paris to see Citlali, on Mila and Dalia’s college break when they were 19 years old. The book repeatedly returns to these two episodes, adding information each time. Throughout the book the three deal with their sense of identity, sexuality, and their emotional closeness and distance from each other, as seen by Mila.

Having learned cross stitch as a child myself, I was eager to read this book. Unfortunately, the stream of consciousness style seemed rambling and random, sometimes into the history and technique of embroidery, but more startling when Mila abruptly goes from her friendships and sewing, to the medical and scientific descriptions of stitches on bodies and skin.

Perhaps the circular, episodic, tangential style helps capture what the author calls the mixed up, confusing, extremely painful state of adolescence, which is the book’s main focus. There are many beautiful metaphors of thread and fabric, depicting the relationships between the three young women, though at one point towards the end of their time in Paris, their needles and scissors become potential weapons to use if sexually assaulted.

Ultimately, I had the sense of Mila’s standing still and turning in circles, re-working parts of her life, as the friends sometimes did with their embroidery. However, I was not sure where this took her in what seemed to be her search to understand and accept the relationships that mattered most at a critical time in her life, and still haunted her in the present.

This book is AMAZING! One of my favorite books of the year. I loved this story so much! I can't wait to share it with friends.

Private note to the publishing team: Using the word "Eskimo" is outdated. If you are referring to the Indigenous People in Northern Canada, the term should be Inuit. I recommend you translate this error before the book is published. For more background: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/eskimo. It has connotations I'm sure you did not intend.

<i>Thank you to Two Lines Press for sending me an ARC of this ebook</i>.

What is the place of art, letters and embroidery in the lives of modern women?

<i>Cross-Stitch</i> attempts to answer this question while exploring the friendship between three women living in Mexico City: Our narrator, Mila, and her best friends from high school, passionate Dalia and melancholic Citlali.

The major time periods covered in their lives are high school, a post-college trip to London and Paris, and middle age when life has brought them to a crossroads. The novel's structure, however, is anything but linear. And therein lies its primary pleasure.

I have several women relatives who tell elliptical stories. We begin in one place, perhaps prompted by a question, and loop forward and back through time and innumerable other relatives until we arrive at the storytellers point.

Some people love this kind of storytelling--when my relatives do it and I'm not on the clock, I find it distracting. Other people find it infuriating. They tune it out or feel impatient, wanting the person to get to the point.

Jazmina Barrera (translated into English by Christina MacSweeney) uses Mila's perspective to shift us forward and back across the women's lives, with each phase of their friendship like a different colour of thread in the pattern she is making. Other characters have less dimensionality; it's really the story of the shared friendship.

Sometimes, this approach makes the book a little disorienting and not a compulsive reading experience. I picked it up and put it down many times. But on the whole, I appreciated the interconnections more and more as I read.

Wading through its pages is a little like joining the characters as they look at famous pieces of art, bringing in global, feminist, and post-colonial lens as needed and always returning to how art sits alongside the confusing, not-always narrative-driven experience of being a human being in the modern world.

I'm glad I picked it up.

A wonderful work in translation. I thought the structure was really interesting how it meandered through the story that created a lovely picture in the end, just like embroidery. I really like how much the craft of embroidery played a part in the story. It was a great picture of friendship.

A beautiful lament to friendship, innocence and youth. Translated from its original Spanish Cross-Stitch is a treasured memory poured out through grief. I loved the free flowing journal style. As someone who marks their life with books I loved the many references to authors and books, recognizing in many the emotion or coming of age event it was expressing or celebrating. Truly beautiful.

In the inventive debut novel by Mexican author Jazmina Barrera, a sudden death provokes an intricate examination of three young women’s years of shifting friendship. Their shared hobby of embroidery occasions a history of women’s handiwork, woven into a relationship study that will remind readers of works by Elena Ferrante and Deborah Levy. Citlali, Dalia, and Mila had been best friends since middle school. Mila, a writer with a young daughter, is blindsided by news that Citlali has drowned off Senegal. While waiting to be reunited with Dalia for Citlali’s memorial service, she browses her journal to revisit key moments from their friendship, especially travels in Europe and to a Mexican village. Cross-stitch becomes its own metaphorical language, passed on by female ancestors and transmitted across social classes. Reminiscent of Still Born and A Ghost in the Throat. (My full early review is at Shelf Awareness.)

A gentle, delicate story which blends the lives of Mila, Citali and Dalia as they move through their late adolescence to adulthood, echoed with a blending of embroidery and it’s importance to women.
Their journey affects each of them deeply as their bodies and identities change.

A gorgeous poignant read from Jazmina Barrera, with the 2023 translation from by Christina Macsweeney.

Thanks to NetGalley and Two Lines press for the ARC.

Unexpectedly beautiful. I read this book because it appealed to my love of fiber arts, but it was far beyond my expectations. Cross-stitch is a beautiful coming of age story of female friendships intertwined with the history of fiber arts and literature. The translation is seemless and I very much enjoyed the narrative structure, with jumps to the past as well as snippets of art history. Magnificent.