The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my own ribs: the prose brims with wind-whipped grit yet slips into the lyrical just as easily. What makes the novel sing isn’t only its technical poise—those long, wave-tossed cadences against staccato spray—it’s the way each page insists that queer joy can be both intimate and revolutionary all at once. The book hands you contraband tenderness the way a friend might pass you a match in a blackout: casual and necessary.
Flaca and Romina start out planning together in a cramped bedroom, knowing that five women in one place would be more than a sleepover—it’d be an outlawed assembly. Under the junta, five was the magic number that turned friendship into “conspiracy” on paper; each of them loving other women turned that danger electric. Yet, somehow, these central five dared it anyway—building a hidden world out of laughter, cigarettes, and midnight whispers, where the threat of prison and worse only thickened the bond. In this story resistance is brewed, not broadcast: a dented cuia of maté—leaves gathered where Guaraní caretakers still tend the riverbank—circles clockwise. Sip, pass, and breathe even as a patrol spotlight slices the darkness and the slur “cantoras” scuffs over the sand. De Robertis shows us that fear can hone our wit without halting it. Laughter, barbed and buoyant, is often the brightest armour.
Time whips back like a boomerang tide—just when you think you’ve skipped to safety… splash! Yeah, it’s the same water, but it’s a new decade as we step into 2013. Pepe Mujica’s in the big chair (when he’s not chauffeuring himself in his famously scruffy VW Beetle), and Uruguay has just signed the dotted line on marriage equality. The news comes by phone—tidy and inconclusive—while a cat, collected as any revolution, lounges on a battered suitcase kept by the door, just in case. Many of us today are being reminded what these characters clearly remember: passports expire, sure—but promises? They can curdle faster than the milk lounging in my fridge door.
Maté gurgles. Salt gusts. A battered radio pirates forecasts, figures, decrees; its twitching aerial mimics river reeds rehearsing rebellion. Even static turns polyphonic, a stammering choir refusing silence as songs, once buried, sing back to life—not ghosts, but grounded voltage. When the syntax of this story snakes, it does so while it mirrors the covert paths these women trace. Every stylistic swerve moonlights as both the map and the territory. Survival is a collective thing, and language—mocked or mumbled—cuts loopholes into the law.
By the last page, reciprocity resounds. Jokes, alarms, and hand-me-down radios tug tomorrows toward the shore, hauling future listeners with them. The sand remembers older pacts than roadside checkpoints, and the sea holds its impartial elegy. Cantoras tunes us into a frequency that outruns the static, asks us to lean close, then leaves us listening for the next unruly voice.
Read this book if you want language to reroute statutes, if you believe a gourd can double as megaphone, if you crave a tale where fear and wit clasp elbows and stand together. Skip it only if you need your sentences tamer and your rivers clearer. Otherwise, pour whatever passes for decent yerba maté where you live, crack open the battered paperback, and tune your radio’s dial—I’ll meet you in the static.
Content Warnings: homophobic slurs; harassment; state-sanctioned surveillance, imprisonment, and violence; sexual assault (brief but explicit); intimate-partner violence; forced outing; death of a loved one; trauma flashbacks; period-typical misogyny
