I've read of political violence and state terrorism before, but not from within such a female perspective. Early on a woman leaves her family to become a resistance fighter and it occurred to me while reading it that I had read so many times of a man going off to war while the woman stays home with the children, a trope so often repeated that it feels natural, and yet here the woman goes, and she is so much a mother, and her choice feels wrenching and unnatural, part of the terror of the times. All of the violence written here is projected through women's bodies, and women's thoughts, and the violences wreaked upon these women are connected, in their thoughts, with their families, and their children--and this depiction of violence through a woman's perspective again feels different from descriptions of men subject to violent acts, in other books, where the violence often seems to be directed against a single individual at a time, not a family; not a net of relationships. The women here are always thinking of their relationships with others, even in the most extreme circumstances. Moving, disturbing, and fragmentary. ( )

I was a member of a forum dedicated to a particular guitarist that had "sendero luminoso" scrawled on one of his guitars and when questioned by a Peruvian member (in a rare occasion we had to pose questions) about their horrific acts his response seemed to hand-wave those acts away. ( )