Real or surreal?: Prayers for the Stolen

I remember a grad-school friend remarking that she used to think Dali was a great surrealist until she went to Spain and figured out that - he was a realist! I wonder if the same holds true for Mexican novelist Jennifer Clement, author of Prayers for the Stolen - on one level her novel, at least from first 50 pp. of so - seems like a surreal portrayal of a community: an isolated Mexican state about an hours drive from Acapulco but a world a part, extreme poverty, land filled with scorpions and snakes, inhabited entirely by women - the man all having fled north to Alaska or Florida and only rarely sending back $, and in which all of the daughters have to be identified as boys for fear that Mexican drug gangs will steal them and sell them into captivity; when the girls hit puberty and their gender cannot be concealed the mothers make them look ugly - blackening their teeth, scuffing up their complexion, for example; there's one girl in the village who's safe from the gangs because she was born w/ a harelip (which she goes to a clinic to have removed - we can only guess the tragic outcome there). Does it sound like a plausible environment or like something out of a Poe, Kafka, or Borges story? But then we think about the Mexican drug lords, about the extreme poverty of rural Mexico, about the brutal life of immigrants in the U.S. and we think yes, she's just telling it like it is - writing about a community and way of life seldom seen by English-language readers. Story is narrated by a preteen or early teen girl in this community who in a cool, deliberate, dispassionate manner tells of horrors of her family life: learning of the infidelities of her father, watching her mother sink further into alcoholism (the backyard is a mountain of empty cans and bottles), fearful as her small clique of girls matures and becomes ever-more vulnerable, troubled and puzzled by a world in which to be desirable is to be endangered.