Candelaria -- Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Hardcover

"Candelaria is a masterpiece from a writer destined to produce many." --Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog

"Candelaria sticks to your soul and leaves you seeing the world and the people in it a bit differently." --Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Olga Dies Dreaming

Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road

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.

Author: Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Publisher: Astra House
Published: 09/19/2023
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781662601804

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2023

About the Author
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants. She co-hosts the podcast Say More and is a member of the band Meli and the Specs. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and her writing has been featured in Remezcla, Paper, The Guardian, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, Wirecutter, Vulture, Bustle, Glamour, The Huffington Post, Muzzle Magazine, The Poetry Project, Audible, and BBC Mundo. She is from Massachusetts and lives in New York City. Her debut novel-in-verse, Dreaming of You, was published by Astra House in 2021.