Candelaria

A Novel

By: Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Narrated by: Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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.

©2023 Melissa Lozada-Oliva (P)2023 Tantor

Critic reviews

"[T]he author's funhouse visions are hard to turn away from. This is a glorious mess."—Publishers Weekly

Stunning!

Story line was amazing! Have never been so invested in a story and I have never come across a novel like this, truly stunning!

Multi-generational family tale

I loved the premise: three generations of women solve family issues with a paranormal twist. I kept getting lost between scene to scene. The timeline is a bit confusing. I definitely did not love the narrator. Differentiating between characters was difficult because most of the characters sound the same. She pulled off a few good accents: none of them being Spanish which wa

wait... what?

"Wait... what? oh, OK. No, wait... what?" Over and over again. This book was a little to cerebral for me.