Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan
Inspired by the myth of Persephone and Demeter, Salt Bones by award-winning poet and author Jennifer Givhan is a mystery thriller set in the fictional border town of El Valle. The novel follows Malamar “Mal” Veracruz and her two daughters as they navigate a community haunted by Mexican folklore and young women’s chilling disappearances.
Twenty-five years ago, Mal’s younger teenage sister, Elena, vanished without a trace. Since then, Mal has lived in limbo — consumed by guilt, unresolved grief, and her ailing mother’s constant emotional abuse. In the present, Mal has managed to live a decent life (on the surface, anyway). She works as a butcher in a local butcher store. Now a mother herself, Mal is doing her best to maintain a stable life with her two daughters: Griselda, a college student, and Amaranta, a strong-willed high schooler.
But beneath her composed exterior, Mal is still haunted by her sister’s disappearance. And she’s also keeping a dark secret from her daughters: their father’s identity. Their father is a man known by locals as “Cuycuy,” (a mythical beast who snatches disobedient children from their homes), a man suspected to have killed his own daughter, the first girl to disappear in El Valle.
After Mal’s coworker Renata, Griselda’s age-mate, vanishes unexpectedly, panic spreads in El Valle. A week later, Mal’s youngest daughter, Amaranta, also disappears. As Mal desperately searches for Amaranta, she is haunted by horrid visions of La Siguanaba — a legendary figure once considered a myth, now terrifyingly real to her. In a frantic search for her daughter, Mal must muster all her strength and confront her unravelling psyche and decade-old, buried secrets.
Rich Culture and Characters
Told through the alternating perspectives of Mal and her two daughters, Salt Bones offers an intimate view of a family unraveling in the shadows of unspeakable loss and small-town mysteries. Each character’s voice is distinct and captures their psychological states with a rawness that feels just as poetic as it feels heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The pacing of the story is slow but still captivating. The setting itself feels as alive and tormented as the people within it. Givhan renders the Salton Sea not just as a backdrop but as a character in its own right; it is toxic, decaying, haunting, yet beautiful.
One of the most interesting features I loved about Salt Bones is Givhan’s use of code-switching. Though the novel is written in English, it is peppered with Spanish words, phrases and expressions that ground the entire story in Mexican cultural authenticity. The fluid blending of the two languages also reflects the characters’ hybrid identities and the challenges of navigating multiple cultures.
The characters in Salt Bones are beautifully complex and incredibly relatable. Mal is the kind of character you will fall in love with immediately. She is messy and broken, yet resilient, strong and has a fierce maternal love. My heart broke for her. She constantly receives abuse from her ailing mom and often cannot even protest or defend herself. Instead, she quietly endures.
Griselda is a young woman trying to carve out her future while still tethered to a painful family history. She often sees her mother with a mixture of admiration and frustration. Her perspective gives a fresh, rational counterpoint to Mal’s more emotionally driven perspective.
Memory and Motherhood
The theme of disappearance in Salt Bones is both literal and symbolic. Girls go missing, family members emotionally disappear, and even the landscape itself is vanishing under environmental decay. The story asks deep questions: What does it mean to be seen? To be believed? To be remembered?
Motherhood is another major theme portrayed in its many forms: tender, protective, flawed and self-sacrificing. Mal is both nurturing and secretive, Mami is abusive and broken, and even Griselda’s protectiveness toward Amaranta. The novel beautifully explores what mothers inherit and what they pass down to their children, intentionally or not.
Salt Bones is a portrait of pain, resilience and the unbreakable bonds between mothers, daughters and women. Givhan’s storytelling is poetic, soulful and vividly descriptive. If you enjoy fiction that dares to be both beautiful and brutal, then this book is a must-read for you.
About Jennifer Givhan:
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Rosa’s Einstein (University of Arizona Press), and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing), which were finalists for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards. Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) both draw from her practice of brujería. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Givhan has taught at the University of Washington Bothell’s MFA program as well as Western New Mexico University, and has guest lectured at universities across the country. Givhan raises her family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, although she is currently researching her next book in San Diego near her hometown of Brawley on the Mexicali border.
