Writing Terror on the Bodies of Women is a complex book that straddles the study of media, history and anthropology to address how print media in Guatemala enables regular displays of violence against women. Sarah England's work fills an important gap in the study of gender-based violence in Latin America by documenting the cultural frames that are used to represent and excuse the murder of women as their bodies are accounted for in the country's newspapers. England uses the text of news reports, participant observation with women's rights organisations and a carefully researched history of how violence against women has been studied in Guatemala. For the author, Guatemala's femicide problem is sustained by the biases that inform how women, perpetrators of violence and the state are understood as participants in violent acts against women and girls.

The study of the Guatemalan cultural context enriches the media studies literature on the reception of gender violence in Latin America by focusing on the cultural mechanisms that sustain these kinds of public performances. Drawing with abandon from the pages of ‘yellow’ and conservative newspapers, the author shares a first-hand look at the barrage of violent men and violated female bodies that they produce to be paraded for regular review. Importantly, the volume also provides clear examples of feminist perspectives on violence against women that simultaneously circulate in Guatemalan popular culture. With this juxtaposition, the author cautions the reader away from easy assumptions on the nature of violence in Guatemala. Most notably, Chapter 6 provides new and important data on the prevalence of particular media portrayals: she analyses the characteristics attributed to murder portrayals in two high-circulation newspapers that serve distinct audiences. England's meticulous documentation makes clear that women are targeted for violence because of their gender.

Writing Terror on the Bodies of Women highlights how the public presence of women's dead bodies is imagined by the state as contiguous to the problem of gang violence. The disregard for women who become carne de cañón (cannon fodder) associated with gangs has important implications for understanding how the state abdicates its role in safeguarding the rights of its citizens. Here England points to the overlooked pitfall of contextualising violence against women as purely extraneous or integral to the domestic space.

In representations that locate violence as solely public, England argues that media reports are employed as mechanisms of active surveillance of women's bodies and their supposed behaviour. The public presence of women's dead bodies meshes together with prevailing cultural norms to explain away their deaths as ‘blancos fáciles’ (‘easy targets’) or ‘malos pasos’ (‘steps in the wrong direction’) defined as such by their very presence in public. Importantly, England reminds readers that how women's bodies are viewed in the media is ‘constructed not so much in what is said, but rather in what is not said and must be filled in with the social imaginary’ (p. 289).

When violence against women is represented as solely private or domestic, the deaths of Guatemalan women are understood as different versions of ‘love gone wrong’. These sorts of arguments collapse violence against women into the privacy of intimacy. They do so, as England explains in Chapter 9, by normalising death as a plausible end to an intimate quarrel, or jealousy as an understandable justification for men who hurt women they ultimately love, without intending to.

Writing Terror on the Bodies of Women is a great complement to existing histories of women's organising in Guatemala such as Susan A. Berger's Guatemaltecas (University of Texas Press, 2006), Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes’ Beyond Repair? (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Patricia Harms’ Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City (University of New Mexico Press, 2020). England's work – most explicitly Chapter 5 – is unique among these in the special attention it gives to how women's movements have addressed the issue of violence against women.

England's documentation of how violence against women is represented and countered is not just an important book for students and scholars of Guatemala or Latin American feminisms. It is also a pivotal book for attorneys, healthcare providers and advocates working with Guatemalan immigrants in the United States, as it provides a clear explanation of why women are compelled to flee Guatemala and seek refuge despite the highly unwelcoming conditions they encounter in Mexico and the United States.