Sainz Borgo's debut novel, "It Would Be Night in Caracas," was a tough act to follow, yet she does so masterfully (through Elizabeth Breyer's scintillating translation) with "No Place to Bury the Dead." Stunning and stark: a real achievement.

No Place to Bury the Dead is a pretty harrowing journey of a mother searching for a safe place to bury her two boys. A plague has come leaving death and the infected in it's wake. As the story unfolds, the reader will become immersed in the character's immediate culture. The dealings of every day people in the community that was and is still surviving. The religious elements surrounding death and dying. Being a reader of the translation, this was so enriching to the overall tone and, obviously, understanding. The story doesn't just end when our main character finally finds a resting place for her children, she gets very involved with the woman running the burial show. Visitacion is an incredibly fierce character. The most intriguing aspect of this story, to me, was her history leading up to how she became the person to go to for burials. I'm partial due to my anthropology degree, but her interactions and interpretations of the process with revering the dead was truly amazing.

The format, I address now, is where my rating was ultimately affected. The chapters are pretty short, which is fine for speedy readers. Some felt kind of untidy. The storyline was fairly neat, except I felt like we reached a confetti style soap opera of dialogue and interactions. This left me kind of squirrely and it made the desire to finish it quicker slow a great deal.

My favorite passages/quotes:

The longer my lungs emptied, the greater my rage: at the plague, at Salverio, at God, and at these men who wouldn't let me pass. 21%

"The day my mother died, I opened her up without shedding a tear....'Mother, if you gave birth to me, and made me as strong as I am, then why should somebody else prepare you for the grave?..."39%

A really bleak read. I’m always rooting for women in impossible circumstances, but I’m not clear what the brutality of the text is supposed to do here aside from shock and depress.

Not the book for me, but might be for you if you can wade through several chapters of a grieving parent housing their dead babies’ corpses in a shoebox.

No, seriously. That’s just the tip of the trauma-berg.

I felt a major disconnect throughout the majority of this novel. That’s such a shame because the synopsis led me to believe No Place to Bury the Dead was the kind of book that would ignite a spark within my brain. I thought it started out with an alluring emotional provocation, but eventually it released me from its grip. I struggled to finish it, but I did see it through, and I will say that I was astonished by the ending. I wish the content in between could have captivated me as much as the outer layers did.

I think, at the very least, it does capture an interesting cultural and political climate, allowing for a unique experience for the reader. Perhaps my overall disinterest won’t be felt by others, and they‘ll discover the power that I had hoped to encounter here.

I am immensely grateful to HarperVia and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.

Thank you net galley and Harpervia for this arc in exchange for my honest review.

This is so different then what I normally choose to read. I really
Like the setting and getting an insight into migrants lives. The pacing at times was slow but over followed a good pace.

This was a great tell of 2 strong women and how they handled all the hardships life through at them.

A dystopian read that will have your wheels turning on the paths people cross. The devastation of the characters is told in a poetic way. The author depicts breathtaking scenes filled with suffering and strife. The characters will captivate you.

Read if you like stories of struggle.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of NO PLACE TO BURY THE DEAD by Karina Sainz Borgo in a Shelf Awareness giveaway. Thank you for the early look, and have a safe holiday season!

Bad men. Strong women. Between the dead and the undead.

More of a mini-series than a novel based on the rush of dialogue and short chapters that equate to better teleplay movements than the novel.

As a novel, the scaffolding between chapters Is rigid. Gives no sense of ground to really sit with the story.

Aside from this, an entertaining story that sings high with drama and violence that I particularly find better explored in say Melchor or Mariana Enriquez’s novels. It was perfect to book-end my scary reads as we move from October to November.

One thing about me, I love some translated horror. And nothing says "horror" quite like grief and desperation. This story is in parts apocalyptic, dystopian, and also, powerful. Set in a fictional Latin American location (El Tercer Pais), Angustias & Visitacion are strong women navigating a world ravaged by a plague that has caused people to migrate while also robbing the infected of their memories. I never like to give too much plot so that is all I will share. Thank you to NetGalley and HarperVia for the ARC. Check this one out when it publishes December 10, 2024.

This book did not keep me engaged and i think had some issues with the translation. I still gave it a three because the premise was initially interesting

wow, this book was great. It was an emotional ride and gave the feelings for melancholia and dread. If you're in a headspace for depressing reads, this is a great one to pick up.

Ten percent into this book I was telling everyone this was going to be a five star read for me. It started out really great. You really feel the pressure of this plague.

It did start to drift off some and i had trouble understanding where it was going. But I think overall this is a good horror story that people are going to love!!

In 2024, I've been working to read more books that have been translated. There's an author I follow, and he's constantly sharing books that were written by women and translated into English. I love the idea because it opens the world up to the reader in a new and different way. I'm also finding a lot of authors who I've never heard of before. No Place to Bury the Dead both fit the category of a work in translation and a woman author.

The book starts with a mass migration following a disease that causes memory loss. Angustias and her husband leave their home following the many others leaving their home towns , carrying their two infant boys with them. On their journey, their sons die, leaving Angustias obviously grief stricken. While grief stricken, Angustias is directed to Visitación, a woman who will make sure her children have a respectful and decent burial in the midst of sorrow and the poverty experienced in Mezquite, the town they've found themselves in. Abandoned by her husband, Angustias finds a path working and apprenticing with Visitación. Visitación's very existence as a female guardian of the dead and the cemetery has set her against very powerful people in the community, and we see the repercussions of this play out throughout the novel.

I'm not going to go too much more into the plot, but wanted to talk about the book and the context it takes shape in. This book very well could be a true story based on the experiences it describes. Following government upheaval in Central and South America, thousands of people in real life have found themselves making the difficult choice to stay or make a difficult and risky journey. Studying global migration was a core part of my Master's degree, and Sainz Borgo's book in a short impactful way captures the essence of what has historically and currently pushed people to cross violent rivers, mountains, and deserts to find a better life. The politics of what has happened following the destabilizing of central governments (usually due to American interference), is described eloquently in such a short novel. I had to rate this 5/5 because of the way the author was able to capture the essence of what regular families are experiencing daily. I could go on for quite some time about how important stories like this are, and their resonance with the real world. People may think some of this fantastical... but in the real lived experiences of migrants, this story is all too common whether it's here in the U.S., the EU, or anywhere else people are forced to try and find a better life elsewhere.

Please be advised I received an Advance Readers Copy (ARC) from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

No Place to Bury the Dead follows the heartbreaking story of a young mother on her journey to bury and mourn her deceased twin boys. Driven to desperation by a speculative plague of amnesia which has swept Latin America, the young mother, aptly named Angustias, must journey to the Third Country, an illegal cemetery on the border operated by an eccentric woman named Visitación.

It is clear while reading that Angustias is little more than a ghost herself, beaten down by the extreme poverty, governmental chaos and the dog-eat-dog nature of their country. With no direction, Angustias agrees to help Visitación in her work, if for no other reason than to stay near her boys.

No Place to Bury the Dead focuses on themes of governmental corruption, poverty and displacement. It is not clear exactly in what country the story takes place, though through language it is clear that it is within Latin America.

The novel is written with sparse prose. There is a certain lack of clarity (absence of quotation marks and indication of speaker, shifting POV between first and third person, lack of explanation for the plague which seems to no longer infect people) that mirrors the chaos our characters’ experience. The stylistic choice works, but did make it a more laborious read.

I’m having a hard time deciding how I felt about this. It’s a difficult read, but a powerful one. Sainz Borgo takes a real-life humanitarian crisis and builds around it a house of horrors which will haunt readers. Where this book missed the mark for me had more to do with stylistic choices, so that’s really more a matter of personal taste. If this one sounds like something you’d like, I’d definitely say pick it up!

Wow, so much to unpack here. The horror is great, the social commentary is spot on, and I really enjoyed the writing and translation. I felt so tense reading this, so worried about these characters. Very impressive.

Intriguing and interesting plot, I was deeply invested in how it would all play out. I found the writing to be quick and snappy, but the translation, at times, took me out of the story. I found that the first few chapters didn't catch my attention immediately, but it definitely picked up and I flew through it. It's bleak and sad but an important read.

Thank you netgalley and HarperVia for the advanced copy for an honest review! Excited to read more from this author.

I was very interested in this book based off the summary and I was very engaged for maybe the first quarter of the book, but then it felt like a bait and switch happened and the memory erasing plague was no longer a threat. Instead we follow Angustia and Visitación as they fight for the burial ground where her sons are laid to rest. At that point I felt it lost all momentum, I made it about 50% of the way through before I had to DNF it. It was well written and some of the characters were interesting but I didn't feel as drawn into the plot as I was with the start.

2.5 stars rounded up because I would have enjoyed the experience more if I had been in a better state of mind to read this type of work.

To preface, I read through the translation. Translations can be tricky in that it can be difficult to fully capture the essence of the writing. Using a different language can transform the nuance into something unfamiliar, and at times something awkward. That being said, I think that may be part of the issue that I had with the work-- that certain spots of dialogue feel rigid and unnatural.

My other difficulty in proceeding through the story was in the layout of the chapters. The entire work comprises many chapters that are on the short side. There are perspective changes between a fair number of characters, and so a reader can go from following along in first-person to doing so in third. I don't see anything inherently wrong with the shifts, but my larger issue lies with the chapter length in and of itself. I believe shorter chapters are useful in conveying a sense of urgency. They can place readers on what feels like a train zooming down the tracks at high speed without any sign of stopping. They can be fun! In this case, however, I do think that the shortness was to the detriment of the work. It contributed to that "stiltedness" in the dialogue, and it also had a way of breaking the immersion.

Overall: the concept is intriguing and there are blips of the writing that I most certainly highlighted because of the way that they personally resonated with me; unfortunately, the experience was more comparable to... something along the lines of searching for a diamond in the rough.

My thanks to the author (Karina Sainz Borgo), the translator (Elizabeth Bryer), the publisher (HarperVia), and NetGalley for providing the eARC through which I was able to read the work and write this review.

Epic and impressive story with some of the greatest characters I've ever read in a work, and I've read a LOT of good characters. 5 stars

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Karina Sainz Borgo’s No Place to Bury the Dead is a powerful and evocative novel that delves into the human dimension of the migrant crisis through a lens of magical realism and dystopian fiction. 

Set in an unnamed Latin American country ravaged by a mysterious plague that erases the memory of anyone infected, the novel follows the journey of a woman named Adela as she navigates this perilous landscape. The plague serves as a poignant metaphor for the loss of identity and history faced by migrants and refugees. 

Adela is a compelling protagonist whose strength and determination drive the story forward. Her journey is fraught with danger and uncertainty, yet her unwavering resolve to remember and honor her past provides a powerful counterpoint to the erasure caused by the plague. 

Borgo’s prose is lyrical and immersive, drawing readers into the surreal and often harrowing world she has created. Her use of magical realism adds a layer of depth to the story, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy in a way that enhances the novel’s emotional impact. 

While No Place to Bury the Dead is a beautifully written and deeply affecting novel, its heavy themes and bleak outlook may not appeal to all readers. The pervasive sense of loss and the stark portrayal of the migrant crisis can be challenging to navigate. 

No Place to Bury the Dead is a poignant and thought-provoking novel that shines a light on the often-overlooked human dimension of the migrant crisis. Karina Sainz Borgo has crafted a story that invites readers to reflect on the fragility of memory and the resilience of the human spirit.

Highly recommended for readers who enjoy magical realism, dystopian fiction, and stories that delve into the complexities of memory, identity, and survival.

This novel will particularly appeal to those who appreciate a blend of lyrical prose and profound thematic exploration.