Stacked Women - by Patricia Melo

Stacked Women is a work of fiction, but all the characters in this book actually exist. The protagonists of this story are women. All of them: the ready-made and the girls, the fat and the thin, the black and the brown, the indigenous and the descendants of immigrants, the illiterate and those with a university degree. In this intense novel, which can be read in one breath and which follows the personal trajectory of a lawyer, Patrícia Melo talks about the systematic killing of women in Brazil, which democratically affects all social classes. In the plot, the young lawyer from São Paulo, trying to make peace with her own past, drops everything and goes to Acre to accompany a group of trials involving women murdered, most of the time by men she knows – fathers, uncles, grandfathers, husbands, boyfriends. , ex-husbands. While watching the most diverse cases of violence against women pass before her eyes, the protagonist discovers a country where impunity is imposed almost like a law. Interspersed with the main narrative, precise and realistic, Patrícia constructs dreamlike chapters, inspired by the legend of the Icamiabas, a tribe of Amazonian warriors who fight against oppressive men. In this parallel world, the lawyer and the icamiabas form a society of women who pursue, judge and kill criminals who escape justice in real life. Guided by ancestral rituals of indigenous people and shocked by the violence around her, the character mixes present and past, reality and nightmare, reason and delirium. His personal quest ends up driving other tragedies, and new crimes join the plot. From this immense pile of corpses, however, she will be able to rescue her own enigma. With Mulheres stackadas, her first novel with female themes and protagonism in 25 years of literature, Patrícia Melo goes against the funk lyrics that have already rocked us on the dance floor, and shows, with her voracious humor, her precise or hallucinogenic phrases and her style unmistakable, that just a tap… sometimes it hurts too much.