3.0 

Blood Red

By Gabriela Ponce & Sarah Booker
Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce & Sarah Booker digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences.


Description: 

In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything. 


Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.

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Blood Red Reviews

3.0
“Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce Padilla, translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker, is a fascinating stream-of-consciousness story that follows a young, married woman as she rollerskates, goes out dancing and doing drugs, and comes term with her relationships with the people around her. She is plagued with doubts of trypophobia and vivid descriptions of period pain that play a role in understanding the energy around her. I found this book incredibly confusing to follow, yet almost addicting to put down. You truly never knew what was gonna happen next, and the narrator is both extremely sensual and emotional. She has sex, she drinks and does drugs, she has mental breakdowns, and is ultimately very lost in her life. The relationships with the various men and women she hangs with strangely affect her, and it is difficult to truly understand her. I loved this. It was weird, beautifully written, and exactly what I was looking for based on the description. If you want a quick and preternatural read, Blood Red is perfect.”
“wth”
“Bit off a bit more than I could chew with this one. Beautifully written in some ways and so descriptive, so questionable in others. I’ve seriously found Shakespeare easier to follow, however this isn’t my usual read at all so don’t necessarily go off of this review. I’m sure some would love this read and this exploration into choices, consequences etc.”
“The first half felt like a thesaurus dump, the second half was actually engaging with the MCs thoughts which were really more introspective. Overall I wish it had all been like the second half. Enjoyable once you get past all the poetic stuff that distracts from the story”

About Gabriela Ponce

Gabriela Ponce (Quito, 1977) is a fiction writer, playwright and theater director, as well as a professor of performing arts at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. In 2015, she published her first book Antropofaguitas, which was considered the best book of short stories by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019, she published the novel Sanguínea (Severo Editorial), also published in Spain by Editorial Candaya, which was awarded the Gallegos Lara prize by the Municipality of Quito for Best Novel of the Year. In 2020, she published Solo hay un jardín: en el fondo de todo hay un jardín (La Caída editorial) a compilation of her plays. She is part of Mitómana, performing arts collective and co-founder of the cultural venue Casa Mitómana. She is on the editorial board of Sycorax magazine.

Sarah Booker

Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review.

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