As Jazmina Barrera teaches both directly and indirectly, to weave is to compose. Her multifaceted debut novel Cross-Stitch initiates readers into the rich history and craft of needlework. For its narrator Mila (Mílada), the art simultaneously fuels and is fueled by close bonds with the women, her dearest friends, who form her inner circle: the flighty but mirthful environmentalist Citlali, the beautiful yet regimented scholar Dalia, the grandmother from whom Mila wishes she had learned more from about xmanikté, the endangered ancient Yucatán embroidery technique, before her passing, and the young daughter whose name Mila carefully embroiders, initiating her into the craft before she old enough to be aware of its power. 

Driving the plot is Mila’s confrontation with grief, as she learns that her beloved Citlali has drowned off Senegal’s coast. Was her death an intentional suicide or was it due to exhaustion? Could Mila have brought her beloved friend back from the brink? Mila rereads journals from years past, portraits of artists navigating the awkwardness of adolescence. In an early, defining passage, Mila interrupts her grappling with Citlali’s death with a meditation on an Old English codex, setting the scene for the intellectual, artistic, and cultural journey to come: “The tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book contains an ambiguous extract: Faemne aet hyre bordan gerised. The ambiguity lies in that bordan can mean table, embroidery, or […] edge. One possible translation is, ‘A woman’s place is at her embroidery.’ A looser translation might be, ‘A woman’s place is on the edge of the abyss.’” It was at the edge of the abyss where Citlali perpetually wavered.

This hybridity makes for an engaging read. Barrera weaves histories of needlework and of feminist art into Mila’s family history; at the same time, this middle-class Mexican bildungsroman is also a travel narrative in which a trio of young adults journeys from the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City to the the Western cultural centers of London and Paris. The novel can also be read as a literacy narrative, one that testifies to its narrator becoming not just an Anglophile student of Victorian literature or an instructor for a community adult literacy project but a writer, a development that is all the more crucial as “it hadn’t been clear […] that I actually wanted to be a writer until I was told that I wasn’t going to be one.” Navigating the complexities of grief while identifying as a creator multiple times over—artist, author, and new mother—Mila confronts the blank page by tracing her individual and collaborative creative roots.

While these diversions may frustrate readers who prefer a more linear narrative, the shifts and interruptions keep readers on their toes while providing reminders of how grief is punctuated by pauses, distractions, and even moments of inspiration. Barrera’s abbreviated histories, close readings, and deep dives into topics ranging from pre-Hispanic cultures to Horace Walpole, Angela Carter, and gothic fiction to the art of Louise Bourgeois and Kate Walker, may also persuade readers to pick up her nonfiction in search of more art writing and literary criticism. Cross-Stitch is as much a novel that can satisfy the cravings of any devotee of the woman artist’s novel as it is a hopeful promise of Barrera’s range and of her innovations to come.  

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Jazmina Barrera’s books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and French. She is the author of Cuerpo Extraño (Foreign Body), awarded the Latin American Voices prize by Literal Publishing; On Lighthouses, chosen for the Indie Next list by IndieBound; and Linea Nigra, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize, CANIEM’s Book of the Year award, and the Amazon Primera Novela (First Novel) Award. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.

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Christina MacSweeney’s award-winning work includes a translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, awarded the Valle Inclán Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent translations include works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez.

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Gabrielle Stecher (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is a Lecturer and Associate Director of Undergraduate Teaching in the Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington. She writes about the stories we tell about women artists and actors, primarily from the nineteenth century to the present. Her portfolio is located at www.gabriellestecher.com.