Mary Pain s hit rock bottom with nothing left to lose but she s also absolutely free. Mary Pain might just be the patron saint of second chances. Unemployed and all out of options, she buys a one-way bus ticket to the dead-end town she grew up in. Time stands still there all the same people still telling the same old gossip she s been running from for ages. Back in her childhood home, she needs to find a way to save the house from foreclosure, care for her ailing grandfather, and make peace with her mother s ghost, whose telephone calls still come in on the old kitchen landline. With the odds stacked against her, Mary Pain doesn t let her mid-life rut keep her down: She picks up men for midnight trysts in the park, and remains open to deepening connections with childhood friends, new lovers, and precocious altar boys. Lola Lorente s slick black inkwork feels sophisticated and voluptuous, and her rendering of townsfolk and their customs is a sensorial delight. Her devoted attention to fabric textures, body shapes, and one-of-a-kind faces brings this cast of oddballs and weirdos, sometimes verging on the grotesque, fully to life. Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, Lorente s English debut is a sorrowful yet hopeful portrait of a young adult at a crossroads in life a quintessential loser looking for meaning and redemption in a town full of ghosts.
