The title is a weather word: in the Canary Islands, panza de burro (“donkey’s belly”) is the low grey blanket of cloud that hides the sun over the north of the islands. Perfect name for a summer where you can’t go to the beach.
Andrea Abreu’s debut (Barrett, 2020; in English, Dogs of Summer): two thirteen-year-old girls in a village in northern Tenerife at the end of the nineties, bored, inventing games, one of them adoring the other, and something ambiguous growing between them.
What everyone talks about is the language: working-class Canarian speech that bends the syntax, lifted from the way the author’s grandmother talked, mixed with bachata lyrics and a lot of body (scabs, scraped knees, vomit). Prizes include the Dulce Chacón.
I’ve started it. Verdict pending.