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.

As Loretta Said, "Snap Out Of It" – The Book That Matters Most, by Ann Hood

The Book That Matters Most was definitely not as interesting or satisfying for me as Hood's The Obituary Writer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't develop enough sympathy for Ava, the character at the center of this novel – somehow she didn't ring true for me.

Ava is heartbroken and distraught when her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, which is certainly understandable. Her grown children, a son and a wayward troubled daughter, Maggie, are living far away from Ava's comfortable home in Providence. Ava's mother is long dead and that loss is a wound that has never healed because Ava has not accepted it. In many ways, Ava has not gone forward and this is her true problem.

The novel weaves around Ava's difficulty in coping with her losses. She has an affair with a younger man she meets in the book club she joins to combat her loneliness. (The structure of the book club is for each member to choose "the book that matters most" to them, hence this novel's title.) Her daughter, who is living in Paris, has fallen into a drug-centered existence and is completely dependent on the older man who has turned her head, made her a kind of love-slave and feeds her addiction.

The reality is that Ava does lead something of a charmed life. She lives in a beautiful home in an elegant section of Providence, Rhode Island. She teaches French. Unlike other women in mid-life who are faced with her losses, she is not struggling financially or materially. She has loyal friendships.

Her problems have a very first-world setting and I want her to get on with things and fix her life. It takes an entire novel and a lot of improbable twists before she gets around to that, and then the conclusion, which finally ties everything up, seems forced. A little ambiguity might have been better and given the reader more food for thought.