Candelaria
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of 2023 - USA Today, Vogue.com, HipLatina, Largehearted Boy
"With tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism, this novel is an unforgettable exploration of diasporic identity politics and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost." —Xochitl Gonzalez, The TODAY Show
"Lozada-Oliva's apocalyptic debut novel in prose is an ode to complicated family dynamics, the overwhelming ways love can consume and eat us alive." —Pamela Avila, USA Today
Your granddaughters are lost, Candelaria. Bianca, the brainy archaeologist, had to forfeit her life's work in Guatemala after her advisor seduced and deserted her. Paola, missing for over a decade, resurfaces in Boston as a brainwashed wellness cultist named Zoe. And Candy, the youngest, is a recovering addict who finds herself pregnant by a man she's not even sure ever existed. None of this concerns you of course, until a cataclysmic earthquake hits Boston. Now you must traverse the crumbling city to reach the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet—for a reason you still cannot disclose—battling strange entities and your own strange past to save your granddaughters and possibly the world.
Author of Dreaming of You Melissa Lozada-Oliva delivers an unsettling, raucous debut novel written with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.
A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Guatemalan American matriarch contends with the apocalypse in the bonkers latest from Lozada-Oliva (Dreaming of You). On Christmas Eve in Boston, 83-year-old Candelaria inexplicably stabs her boyfriend to death with a kitchen knife. Shortly thereafter, she survives a devastating earthquake. On the move, she attempts to reach the Old Town Buffet in the Watertown Mall as zombies begin roaming the roads. Most of the story, however, unfolds a year earlier in the thorny lives of Candelaria's three granddaughters: Paola, who has become a fitness/wellness guru at the Women's Stone, a cultish women's center; Bianca, an ambitious archaeologist recently ejected from a dig in Guatemala by her mentor and lover, Fernando Moreno; and Candy, a recovering heroin addict. Fernando appears at the movie theater where Candy works, which leads to an eventual date and an unwanted pregnancy. As Bianca sleuths out Fernando's whereabouts, the plot builds to a bloody climax at the Women's Stone's underground bunker. Though the switching back and forth between disparate story lines tends to throttle an otherwise propulsive narrative, the author's funhouse visions are hard to turn away from. This is a glorious mess.