Caro De Robertis
Author of Cantoras: A novel
About the Author
Carolina De Robertis is the author of Perla, The Invisible Mountain, and The Gods of Tango. She is the recipient of Italy's Rhegium Julii Prize and a 2012 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: Author Carolina de Robertis at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83859566
Works by Caro De Robertis
Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times (2017) — Editor — 216 copies, 4 reviews
So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (2025) 97 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
McSweeney's 46: Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America (2014) — Translator — 101 copies, 5 reviews
Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (2023) — Contributor — 40 copies, 1 review
Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color―A Moving Anthology Celebrating Joy, Heartbreak, and Self-Discovery (2025) — Contributor — 15 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- De Robertis, Caro
- Birthdate
- 1975
- Gender
- nonbinary
- Awards and honors
- John Dos Passos Prize (2022)
- Short biography
- A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of So Many Stars: an Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color, as well as The Palace of Eros, which won the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award; The President and the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Gods of Tango, winner of a Stonewall Book Award; Perla; and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, which received Italy's Rhegium Julii Prize. They are also an award-winning translator of Latin American literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times.
Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary person to receive.
De Robertis is also co-curator, with Tina V. Aguirre, of “Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements,” an exhibition on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from March to August, 2026. A professor at San Francisco State University, they live in Oakland, California with their two children. - Nationality
- Uruguay
- Places of residence
- England, UK
Switzerland
Oakland, California, USA
Members
Reviews
You know the kind of book where you forget that you're reading words on a page and all of a sudden it's much later than you'd wanted to stay up? This is that kind of novel. Set in Uruguay during the civic-military regime during the seventies and eighties, when Uruguayans lived under constant surveillance and danger of arrest, the novel follows a group of queer women who find a haven of sorts in an isolated beach community. For a few days or a week at a time, they can live authentically, show more although always careful of the people around them.
De Robertis takes her time, revealing the women's histories slowly, as the years go by, as well as taking the women forward as they age. It's a bit of a balancing act, illuminating recent Uruguayan history to readers who know very little about that small South American country, while not boring those who might know more, and while keeping the focus on the five women at the center of the story.
At times dramatic, at times understated, I found this novel to be one that fully captured my attention. I'm looking forward to De Robertis's next novel. show less
De Robertis takes her time, revealing the women's histories slowly, as the years go by, as well as taking the women forward as they age. It's a bit of a balancing act, illuminating recent Uruguayan history to readers who know very little about that small South American country, while not boring those who might know more, and while keeping the focus on the five women at the center of the story.
At times dramatic, at times understated, I found this novel to be one that fully captured my attention. I'm looking forward to De Robertis's next novel. show less
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be show more ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.
When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.
Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.
Told in bold and sparkling prose, The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: All the Muses please praise the Divine Madeline...Miller, of The Song of Achilles fame...for igniting the seemingly unquenchable flame of queered/regendered mythology retellings we've been treated to this past decade.
The existence of a flood means, obviously and inevitably, some iterations will not live up to the flood-breaker's level. This book is one that doesn't quite reach heights the very best do. Most of that is down to a tendency of the author to, um, overelaborate:
I think that single sentence says more than I ever could.
I am very sure that, absent familiarity with the many versions existing of the underlying myth, this story will still make sense. After you take out you mental machete and whack back some of the vines and shrubs in your path. It is not, in the final analysis, a terribly complicated plot. It's about the nature of desire, and to twenty-first century eyes, the nature of consent.
I was most interested in Author De Robertis' decision to use first-person narration, and a deep access to her thoughts and feelings, for the human/victim of coercive sex Psyche, while according the deity/rapist third person freedom. A force of nature like a deity should, I agree, have an impersonal voice; if any personification of a natural force needs and deserves this distancing, it is the personification of Lust, and subsidiarily, physical Love. There is a reason the Greeks split Love/Aphrodite from Lust/sex Eros. These things are not the same.
I don't entirely understand why, post-#MeToo, one would choose to retell this particular myth without including some examination of the romanticization of coercion that the myth has always represented. Making Eros a non-binary deity, while very much in the spirit of the times, doesn't change what Eros did to Psyche.
A slender reed of a story to hang a novel on, and one that still misses its chances to add value to the ongoing conversation about sexuality and romance. Published about ten years too late to make its best and biggest splash. show less
The Publisher Says: Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be show more ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.
When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.
Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.
Told in bold and sparkling prose, The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: All the Muses please praise the Divine Madeline...Miller, of The Song of Achilles fame...for igniting the seemingly unquenchable flame of queered/regendered mythology retellings we've been treated to this past decade.
The existence of a flood means, obviously and inevitably, some iterations will not live up to the flood-breaker's level. This book is one that doesn't quite reach heights the very best do. Most of that is down to a tendency of the author to, um, overelaborate:
She came here on some winged creature through the night sky, she is a woman free to roam the sky, a woman with a palace, a woman whose days are hidden from you, a woman who can do outrageous things to another woman’s body, a woman whose power is mountainous, whose strength is vast, whose charm is boundless, you’d never imagined such a woman could be, yet here she is, and far be it from you to anger her when she’s already given you so much, how could you ask for more, when she has chosen you for this adventure for some inscrutable reason you’ll never understand, just as it’s impossible to understand how this adventure can exist or what the scope of it will be, but there it is, the need to clasp it close and not let go because you want this life she’s offered you, want it with every fiber of your being, yet also want to hold on to your own knowing, however tiny it may be compared to hers.
I think that single sentence says more than I ever could.
I am very sure that, absent familiarity with the many versions existing of the underlying myth, this story will still make sense. After you take out you mental machete and whack back some of the vines and shrubs in your path. It is not, in the final analysis, a terribly complicated plot. It's about the nature of desire, and to twenty-first century eyes, the nature of consent.
I was most interested in Author De Robertis' decision to use first-person narration, and a deep access to her thoughts and feelings, for the human/victim of coercive sex Psyche, while according the deity/rapist third person freedom. A force of nature like a deity should, I agree, have an impersonal voice; if any personification of a natural force needs and deserves this distancing, it is the personification of Lust, and subsidiarily, physical Love. There is a reason the Greeks split Love/Aphrodite from Lust/sex Eros. These things are not the same.
I don't entirely understand why, post-#MeToo, one would choose to retell this particular myth without including some examination of the romanticization of coercion that the myth has always represented. Making Eros a non-binary deity, while very much in the spirit of the times, doesn't change what Eros did to Psyche.
A slender reed of a story to hang a novel on, and one that still misses its chances to add value to the ongoing conversation about sexuality and romance. Published about ten years too late to make its best and biggest splash. show less
"A cantora," Flaca said, flopping another fish into the clean pile, "is a woman who sings"......"A woman like us, Malena said." (Page 37)
This is a book you can really sink into and allow yourself to be completely engrossed by the story. I knew little about Uruguay in the late 70s but it was another brutal dictatorship in South America, the second I've read about this year. This story highlights the horrors of being a queer woman at this time. Not only was the government against you but so show more were a great number of the populace. It wasn't something easily admitted to, so when five lesbian women somehow find each other and gather together enough money to purchase a shack on a squirt of land on the Atlantic coast where they have the freedom to be themselves.....well, it just was so uncommon an idea that they managed to pull it off.
The book details their individual lives and I came to admire their tenacity and ability to create a loving family, complete with all the warts that may be found in any family, but fiercely loyal. The shack on the Atlantic coast provided a warm respite from the horrors of the dictatorship in Montevideo, the capital city where they all got their start. I really enjoyed my time with Paz, La Venus, Romina, Flaca and Malena.
Beautifully written, historical fiction at its best, and highly recommended. show less
This is a book you can really sink into and allow yourself to be completely engrossed by the story. I knew little about Uruguay in the late 70s but it was another brutal dictatorship in South America, the second I've read about this year. This story highlights the horrors of being a queer woman at this time. Not only was the government against you but so show more were a great number of the populace. It wasn't something easily admitted to, so when five lesbian women somehow find each other and gather together enough money to purchase a shack on a squirt of land on the Atlantic coast where they have the freedom to be themselves.....well, it just was so uncommon an idea that they managed to pull it off.
The book details their individual lives and I came to admire their tenacity and ability to create a loving family, complete with all the warts that may be found in any family, but fiercely loyal. The shack on the Atlantic coast provided a warm respite from the horrors of the dictatorship in Montevideo, the capital city where they all got their start. I really enjoyed my time with Paz, La Venus, Romina, Flaca and Malena.
Beautifully written, historical fiction at its best, and highly recommended. show less
“Cantora” is now an old-fashioned word in Spanish meaning singer, but it has another (also old-fashioned) meaning: a woman who is attracted to other women. In this novel spanning four decades, five cantoras find each other under a Uruguayan military dictatorship, form a close friendship, and inspire future cantoras.
Content warnings:
- pedophilia, child grooming, and CSA (also discussed in this review)
- cheating
- rape
- electroshock “therapy” and torture (described in painful detail)
- show more nazism
- suicide (also described in painful detail)
- homophobia
- casual cissexism
- biphobia
Representation:
- almost every character is Uruguayan
-one of the five MCs (Romina) is biracial and Jewish
- every MC is sapphic; all but one (La Venus, who’s bisexual) is gay
Carolina De Robertis’s writing is consistently beautiful, even if it’s also exhaustingly long-winded. The story’s focus is less on its plot (which is light and slow) and more on the five central characters themselves, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with the two major settings: their city and Cabo Polonio, the beach where they first vacation to and become a tight found family.
I’m not much bothered by the sluggish pacing or the wordy writing--especially when it’s this lovely--but the dialogue does become a little stilted. But then again, I think the book suffers the most when it vanishes altogether. I was so surprised at the amount of backstory in the second half, and that’s saying something, because I was also surprised at the amount of backstory present in the the first. But the first act is told through each main characters’ alternating PoVs in what I'd describe as being fairly “immediate” when compared to the better half of the second act, which consists almost entirely of summaries.
There is also character “development” that happens completely off page; for example, Paz, the youngest of the main five, ages the most dramatically in the time skip from the first and second act because she's sixteen at the beginning of the book--and she becomes almost unrecognizable. This change isn’t summarized, either. She’s just changed. But maybe this is something that’s common in fiction that spans multiple generations, and because that’s not a genre I read very often, it's strange to me.
Okay, but I have to give compliments where compliments are due: trauma is handled extremely well. The majority of these characters have their own trauma, each unique, each painful, each handled superbly. Even when I kind of wish it wasn’t, like with Paz, who was groomed by an adult when she was about thirteen years old. On one hand, I’m amazed at how realistic and unbiased the author handled this situation, because Paz herself doesn’t see what happened to her as abusive. She sees it rather as a kind of lesbian awakening, largely due to the way she was groomed, while her (adult) friends are horrified by what happened to her. Though I wish Paz’s opinion changed when she got older (because if not, that could be how those situations happen again, but with Paz in the opposite role), I admire the way the risk taken here.
I also appreciate how the author made it so the novel never really picks sides or has biases when it comes to fights between the main characters--especially when these fights are about things like cheating, things that usually do pick one side. It never becomes a morality lesson or a character blatantly preaching to another. So I appreciate that, even though personally I have such strong feelings about it that it was difficult to sit through the fights without wanting the book to take sides.
There were a few other things that bothered me, like some over-the-top descriptions of certain characters that go on and on, the biphobia, and the almost fetishistic descriptions of the indigenous Guaraní character, but overall this was a beautiful and heartbreaking book I'm glad to have read. show less
Content warnings:
- pedophilia, child grooming, and CSA (also discussed in this review)
- cheating
- rape
- electroshock “therapy” and torture (described in painful detail)
- show more nazism
- suicide (also described in painful detail)
- homophobia
- casual cissexism
- biphobia
Representation:
- almost every character is Uruguayan
-one of the five MCs (Romina) is biracial and Jewish
- every MC is sapphic; all but one (La Venus, who’s bisexual) is gay
Carolina De Robertis’s writing is consistently beautiful, even if it’s also exhaustingly long-winded. The story’s focus is less on its plot (which is light and slow) and more on the five central characters themselves, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with the two major settings: their city and Cabo Polonio, the beach where they first vacation to and become a tight found family.
I’m not much bothered by the sluggish pacing or the wordy writing--especially when it’s this lovely--but the dialogue does become a little stilted. But then again, I think the book suffers the most when it vanishes altogether. I was so surprised at the amount of backstory in the second half, and that’s saying something, because I was also surprised at the amount of backstory present in the the first. But the first act is told through each main characters’ alternating PoVs in what I'd describe as being fairly “immediate” when compared to the better half of the second act, which consists almost entirely of summaries.
There is also character “development” that happens completely off page; for example, Paz, the youngest of the main five, ages the most dramatically in the time skip from the first and second act because she's sixteen at the beginning of the book--and she becomes almost unrecognizable. This change isn’t summarized, either. She’s just changed. But maybe this is something that’s common in fiction that spans multiple generations, and because that’s not a genre I read very often, it's strange to me.
Okay, but I have to give compliments where compliments are due: trauma is handled extremely well. The majority of these characters have their own trauma, each unique, each painful, each handled superbly. Even when I kind of wish it wasn’t, like with Paz, who was groomed by an adult when she was about thirteen years old. On one hand, I’m amazed at how realistic and unbiased the author handled this situation, because Paz herself doesn’t see what happened to her as abusive. She sees it rather as a kind of lesbian awakening, largely due to the way she was groomed, while her (adult) friends are horrified by what happened to her. Though I wish Paz’s opinion changed when she got older (because if not, that could be how those situations happen again, but with Paz in the opposite role), I admire the way the risk taken here.
I also appreciate how the author made it so the novel never really picks sides or has biases when it comes to fights between the main characters--especially when these fights are about things like cheating, things that usually do pick one side. It never becomes a morality lesson or a character blatantly preaching to another. So I appreciate that, even though personally I have such strong feelings about it that it was difficult to sit through the fights without wanting the book to take sides.
There were a few other things that bothered me, like some over-the-top descriptions of certain characters that go on and on, the biphobia, and the almost fetishistic descriptions of the indigenous Guaraní character, but overall this was a beautiful and heartbreaking book I'm glad to have read. show less
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- 8
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- Rating
- 3.8
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