3. A book written in South America: Space Invaders by Nona Fernández

List Progress: 10/30

Even more of a threat than “may you live in interesting times” is “may you come of age in interesting times”. In all of the dramatic and tumultuous moments of human history, there have been children and adolescents growing into adults in the midst of them. Space Invaders, the 2013 novel by Chilean author Nona Fernández, tells the story of a group of youths coming of age during the Pinochet dictatorship. One of their classmates was the daughter of a government official, and one day she was simply gone. Their memories of this disappeared girl come in waves and bursts, and are threaded through with imagery from the video game Space Invaders, one of the only ways these children can conceptualize the horrors happening around them.

Space Invaders is subtitled A Novel, but that feels slightly misleading, with its very short chapters, non-chronological story and loose, impressionistic story. The book is quite light on plot, but dense in feeling and sensation, rich with the sense of being in over one’s head. Many of the experiences are based on Fernández’s own childhood, and she captures the feeling of looking back through the haze of time. There is not much to tell about what happened to the little lost girl Estrella, but it had a huge impact on her peers and bruised them for the rest of their lives. Space Invaders isn’t going to take the reader along for a mystery or teach them facts about Pinochet’s regime, but it is going to let them feel what it is to be a child in a big, overwhelming world, and sometimes that is enough.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.