Publication Date: August 16,
2022
Format: Audio
Genre: Magical realism
Narrators: Kyla Garcia
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Publisher: Highbridge
Length: 6 hours 53 min
Buy: Kindle | Audio
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Synopsis
Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma,
she was a traditional healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she
taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as
veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their
secrets.
Sent to report on Paloma's murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain
village of San Felipe. There, the two women's lives twist around each
other in a danse macabre. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to
become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand
the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a
hostile environment shaped by and for men.
Weaving together two parallel narratives that mirror and refract one
another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as storyteller and
the writer as healer, and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a
world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of
hope.
Review:
Told in dual narratives. Zoe is a reporter who travels to a mountain
village to do a story on Paloma's murder, but what she finds is a famous
healer, Feliciana. She listens to Feliciana's story of being a woman
who does healing work that is usually done by men. When men were
jealous of her she had been shot, her house set fire, etc. Men can't
handle women being powerful. Feliciana is Paloma's sister, she was born a
man but lives as a woman, she gave up practicing the healing ceremonies so
she could live the way she wanted.
Zoe's story wasn't as strong as Feliciana's but it still showed how it is to
be a woman in today's society. Her sister is a rebel who walks to the beat
of her own drum, getting kicked out of schools, bi-sexual, and unapologetic.
Zoe is not like her sister but seems to appreciate her boldness and
the way she is so comfortable in her own skin.
This book is about learning to be yourself despite the gender you are
born.To learn to live in the present and leave the past behind. To be proud
of yourself and the hardships that women endure in life and how men can
often be scared of strong empowered women which is why they make laws to
hold them down, use their physical strength to dominate. There are
stories of sexual assault, abortions, HIV and the way women's lives are made
difficult. Mexican healing traditions, and magic swirl throughout the book
which is written in a beautiful Spanglish prose.
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