"People around here say it's God who chooses the ones that get crossed out. But I know better. There ain't no good reason one way or the other. The only thing to do is keep that brain of yours sharp."

So says Lucia, one of two narrators through Locas, Yxta Maya Murray's gruesome fictional exploration of female Chicano gang life in Los Angeles . A bleak tale of two distinctly different women caught in the same destructive social maelstrom, Locas eschews graphic depiction of barrio violence in favor of a much more powerful humanism. Murray 's debut novel expertly avoids the pitfalls of the overtly political, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.

Lucia is a young immigrant from Tecate, Mexico whose brutal family history has led her to Echo Park , an eerily beautiful, crime-ridden barrio just east of downtown Los Angeles where a local gang, the Lobos, has established itself through a network of weapons and drugs trading. Its leader, Manny, becomes the object of Lucia's attention. But she's not impressed with his charisma, his power, or his ingenuity; Manny represents nothing more than a stepping stone in Lucia's own rise to independence. Lucia is a cold, ferocious character, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Instead, it is Manny's younger sister, Cecilia, that provides the soul and conscience of Locas. Thrust into gang life through adulation of her older brother, the need for a sorely absent paternal figure, and the innocent desire to belong somewhere, anywhere, Cecilia's words are quiet, heart-breakingly self-demeaning, and full of idols. But like Lucia's, her voice is bluntly honest.

"I know I'm no beauty," she says. "They call me Muneca because I'm short, but that doesn't make me dainty. I got these square hips and shoulders, like a little fat box, and I'm Aztec-looking with a flat brown face, too dark to be any real good ... But the bigger Manny got, the more Lobos he brought in, and the richer he made them, the prettier I looked."

Both women ultimately find solace outside the world of men—Lucia through the cholas she recruits into her "clika" from the local junior high school; Cecilia through banter with other expecting mothers on the benches around Echo Park 's small reservoir. When Cecilia miscarries and her older brother is stripped of his power as Lobos jefe, Cecilia finds hope only in a very tenuous and ambiguous relationship with Chuco, a gang-banging Latina from a rival neighborhood.

As the Lobos' power escalates, so do their enemy numbers, and Echo Park becomes a battlefield where drive-by shootings, beatings, and the ruthless initiation of ever-younger blood into the fold is commonplace. Through the warfare, Lucia and Cecilia suffer devastating personal losses. The way they choose to deal with tragedy, however, is unique to each; Lucia becoming ever-more ruthless and power-grabbing, Cecilia retreating into the way of life of her much-maligned mother—a church-going housemaid of L.A.'s upper-class white populace, the gabachos.

However unsettling and graphic, Locas is no polemic; there is no overt critique of the destructive economic, racial, or gender inequity that pervades the narrators' lives. And while both attain essentially what they had set out for (absolute independence from male society for Lucia; a true sense of belonging for Cecilia), neither can be termed victorious. As such, there is no moral to be found within Locas.