World of Confusion – Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I really wanted to like this book, and it started off appealingly, but as I read on it became more and more disjointed. I suspect that was the author's intention, with the book partially set amidst a geological and political disaster, but I eventually just lost interest. I skipped through to the end, and I was never really clear on where it was all going. The end didn't clarify or wrap up anything for me. It was disappointing. I was hoping to discover a new Latina voice I could embrace.

This is a family story of three generations of women of Guatemalan heritage living in Boston: elderly grandmother Candelaria, her daughter Lucia, and granddaughters Paola, who disappeared and is now back and calling herself Zoe, while living as part of a bizarre women-only brainwashed cult; the second daughter is Bianca, who became an archeologist but was pushed out of her Ph.D. program after an affair with her program advisor; and the youngest, Candy (short for Candelaria) a recovering heroin addict and film buff, who works in an art house cinema. The granddaughters' lives become intermeshed through their attachments to men and others. There's a kind of magic realism quality to the book, but it's more nightmarish than mystical. 

This was a novel I chose as one of my Mark Twain American Voice in Literature candidates to read and rate in the initial round of that selection. Unfortunately I cannot recommend that it goes forward in the competition.

Eighteen Voices – A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, edited by Eleanor Brown

A mixed bag of essays on Paris by women writers. Some were certainly more appealing (at least to me) than others. 

My picks, alphabetized by author:

Investigating Paris by Cara Black

Thirty-four Things You Should Know About Paris by Meg Waite Clayton

My Paris Dreams by M.J. Rose

The Passion of Routine by Jennifer L. Scott

Paris Alone by Maggie Shipstead was my favorite: The author writes about a time when she had received funding for residency in a Paris complex for artists and writers, where she could write her book, and she did, indeed, while spending nearly all of that time alone with her work and thoughts, something she was quite comfortable with and that I can completely understand. When speaking of social encounters at cocktail parties, trade events, and other events of the publishing life, she quotes another author, unnamed, who tells her, "You're a gregarious shy person," ... "You can do the sociable thing, but you don't draw power from it the way real extroverts do. It takes something out of you." The next time someone asks me if I am an introvert or an extrovert that is what I'll say – I'm a gregarious shy person.

Paris Is Your Mistress, by Ellen Sussman

A Myth, a Museum, and A Man by Susan Vreeland 

Generations of History – The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa

This novel is about four generations of women and has multiple settings: Nazi Germany, Cuba during both the Batista and Castro regimes, New York, and the reunited Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the near present.

Ally is a beautiful young German poet in Berlin who has a relationship with Marcus, a Black German jazz musician, while Hitler and his Fascism is sweeping the country. Marcus eventually disappears and is presumed dead. Ally has given birth to a daughter, Lilith, a brilliant child whom she realizes she must hide away since the child is a Mischling – of two races – and forbidden and hated by the Nazis and their policy of racial purity. The two go out only by night where Lilith's darker skin tone and hair texture are not on display. 

Very painfully, Ally concludes she can only protect Lilith by sending her away, and the child joins the Herzogs, a Jewish couple on the ill-fated SS St. Louis on its way to Cuba, where they are some of the very small number allowed to enter that country, despite its promise to take in the ship's large number of Jewish refugees. The St. Louis will also be rejected by FDR's government, and returns to Germany, where its remaining passengers will be murdered in the concentration camps.

Lilith is raised by the Herzogs and eventually she and her closest friend, Martín, fall in love and marry. Martín is a Cuban air force  pilot and his family is close to the Batista government. The two have a daughter, Nadine, but Martín is killed when Castro takes over. Lilith, through contacts in the Catholic church, follows her mother Ally's path, and arranges for Nadine to be sent to Queens, New York where she is raised by a couple there – the man is a veteran of World War II, and his wife is a German immigrant he met while serving abroad. The wife hides a terrible secret.

Nadine inherits her mother's intelligence and becomes a scientist. She is multi-lingual and moves to Germany, where she marries Anton. They have a daughter, Luna, whose skin color echoes her grandmother's. As an adult, Luna, always a voracious reader and writer, convinces Nadine to explore her family history, something she has long avoided.

This is a complex story – part family saga, part historical epic, part study of the complexity of racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual preferences. It's beautifully written, and examines many difficult, challenging topics many authors, and readers, may choose to avoid, but there is much to learn here. 

I would also encourage readers not to skip the Author's Note following the end, which provides  background on some of the issues raised in the text, the first two paragraphs of the Acknowledgements, and the extensive Bibliography. This author truly did his homework...