Lilus Kikus inglés

By Elena Poniatowska and Fernanda Piderit

This great novel by Elena Poniatowska tells us about the transition from childhood to adulthood of Lilus Kikus, a girl who never stops asking questions and looking for answers in everything around her. A novel that has not lost its validity on the place that a girl occupies in our society and the struggles that she must face on a daily basis, without losing her enthusiasm and the joy of living. Recrea Libros reissues from Chile this magnificent story that will captivate boys and girls for its adventures, and adults, for the wise childish gaze of society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recrealibros
• Release date: Jan 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9789566163428

Elena Poniatowska

Elena Poniatowska is the award-winning author of over fifty books. Born in France to a Mexican citizen of French ancestry, she now lives in Mexico City. In 2004, she was honored with the Legion de Honor del Gobierno de Francia. Poniatowska has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Emeritus Fellowship from Mexico's National Council of Culture and Arts. In 1979, she became the first woman to win the Mexican National Award for Journalism.

Book preview

Lilus’ games

Lilus Kikus... Lilus Kikus... Lilus Kikus I’m calling you!

But Lilus Kikus, seated on the sidewalk is too absorbed doing surgery on a fly to hear her mother’s call. Lilus never plays in her bedroom, a room spoiled by tidiness. Better to play on the street corner, under the tiny tree growing at the edge of the sidewalk. From there she can see cars and people go by, as if they are out to save the world…

Lilus believes in witches and, in her britches, she sews fine herbs, grasses, and rosemary, plus a hair off Napoleon’s head, the ones you can buy for ten pesos at school. And a tooth, the first one she lost. All this she puts in a little pouch that hangs over her navel. Later the girls at school will wonder about the cause of that bump.

In a little box Lilus also keeps the black ribbon off a dead person, two hard grey pieces of nails from her father’s feet, a three-leaf clover and dust from the feet of the Christ at the Our Lady of Mercy church.

Since going to her uncle’s farm, Lilus has discovered her own toys. She has a nest there and spends hours and hours staring at it, looking at the fragile little eggs and the sticks and twigs that shape the nest. With great interest she closely follows the little bird’s every move: Now he sleeps, in a bit I’ll bring it some food… She has a centipede that she keeps in a sock and some enormous flies on which she performs appendectomies. At the farm there are ants, very fat ants. Lilus gives them cough syrup and puts their broken legs in casts. One day she goes to the town’s pharmacy to buy a syringe with a very fine needle that she urgently needs for Miss Lemon, a green lime with horrible stomach pains that Lilus treats with black coffee injections and wrapping her in one of her mother’s scarves. In the afternoon she sees other patients: Ms. Orange, Eva the Apple, Grapefruit the widow, and Mr. Banana who, stressed by life, developed gout, and being less resistant than the other patients, would soon see his own demise.

Lilus does not have dolls. Maybe her physique explains why. She is thin and takes big steps because her legs —long and distanced from one another —are jumpy, they cramp1 and then she trips. When she falls, Lilus causes