One Life
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Richard, an American in Mexico, helps save the lives of the guilty. A mitigation specialist, hired by defense teams on capital cases in the U.S., he combs the back roads of starving-to-death Mexican shanty towns and agricultural villages. Divorced, a failed novelist with no family, and not too keen on attachments, he investigates the traumatic personal histories of undocumented Mexicans facing the death penalty in his home country.
Esperanza is a young woman from the destitute Mexican hamlet of Puroaire. Trying to escape a life of poverty and abuse, her journey leads her to the United States, where she works on a cleanup crew after Hurricane Katrina. Her harrowing adventure is like that of millions of undocumented workers in the U.S. — until she finds herself in a jail cell, accused of murdering her baby. When Richard visits Esperanza in jail, the boundaries of his closely circumscribed life explode.
Set in the American South and in rural Mexico, One Life examines the indelible links between life and death, sex and love. It’s at once a page-turning mystery and a profound examination of freedom and justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lida's intense, intricate first novel follows the lives of Esperanza Morales, a 27-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico accused of killing her infant, and Richard, the 42-year-old American mitigation specialist tasked with humanizing her so that, if she's convicted, Louisiana won't give her the death penalty. The aspiring white knight drinks and sleeps his way through Mexico and the southern United States on his quest for "a mitigating circumstance: mental illness; great promise thwarted; violence, abuse and neglect; toxic waste in the well water; previous good deeds heretofore unpunished; a line of people willing to testify that they would be devastated if the client were put to death." The author, a mitigation specialist himself, describes the profession with wit and insight, which provide are necessary moments of levity. The otherwise bleak narrative alternates between Richard's account of the events leading up to his untimely death (revealed in the opening pages) and Esperanza's memories of her long, fruitless search for a life with basic amenities and someone to love. Lida grounds a potentially disorienting plot in motifs that add texture and structure. Despite the prose's occasional overreaches, the story succeeds as a dramatic tale of sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence, a thorough indictment of the U.S. and Mexican criminal justice systems, and a moody rumination on why we care about the lives of others.
