Publishers Weekly
10/02/2023
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. Agent: Rachel Kim, 3Arts. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Lozada-Oliva’s imagination draws upon an inventive mix of narrative traditions — from melodrama to zombie horror to slacker comedy . . . a soapy, apocalyptic picaresque."—Tracy O'Neill, The New York Times Book Review
"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
"Equal parts poignant, hilarious and horrific, this novel is a macabre feast for the senses—try a taste if you dare.
—Katherine Ouellette, WBUR
"Lozada-Oliva’s book explores the fraught but loving relationships between three sisters, their mother, their grandmother, and their connections, both real and imagined, with their Guatemalan homeland. It offers deep insights into Latina/o/x/e family dynamics, and is laugh-out-loud funny."
—Geraldo Cadava, Public Books
"Bonkers . . . the author's funhouse visions are hard to turn away from."
—Publishers Weekly
"Melissa can turn a person into a hero, a cryptid, and someone closer than family in the space of a page. She lives in a world that’s just as flawed and messy and gross as ours, but sees the beautiful, dark magic that the rest of us keep missing — probably because she’s harnessed it so perfectly here. Candelaria is a masterpiece from a writer destined to produce many."
—Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog
"Candelaria is a thrilling ride. Melissa Lozada-Oliva captures with deft humor the lives of a matriarch and her brood of daughters and granddaughters as they survive addiction, patriarchy, capitalism, natural disasters, and zombies. Reading Lozada-Oliva's work is like attending a family reunion, one where you hang in the backyard smoking a joint with your favorite cousin. Melissa is a smart, compassionate, and hilarious writer. I will read anything she writes."
—Alejandro Varela, author of the 2022 National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon
"Electric from the first page, Lozada-Oliva's story of high-octane family dynamics and transformation is swiftly paced and deliciously vivid. Sparkling with character and dialogue, Candelaria is not only a novel, but a multisensory experience."
—Amanda Montell, author of Cultish and Wordslut
"‘What’s the point of lying at the end of the world?’ In the cataclysms holding the center of her wild and exuberant novel, Melissa Lozada-Oliva shows our willingness to still keep big secrets and hide hard truths, our everyday fears always greater than the chaos of a world on the brink. Candelaria goes for broke and why not? 'Names erode,' we are warned. But good stories? Never."
—Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
"Melissa takes us on an intense journey about the end of days, showing us that family might be the only thing that will save us, all while throwing in some Stephen King-level horror that’ll make your heart race. This ride's a wild one – and you're gonna wanna be on it."
—Oz Rodriguez, director of Vampires Vs. the Bronx
“Buckle up—Candelaria is a literary ride unlike any other. A wild journey through generational trauma, untold truths, sibling rivalry and intimacy via backroads lined with cinema, cult fitness and the supernatural. Fear not, though the landscape Lozada-Oliva creates is utterly original and chaotic at times, she is a masterful guide whom I would follow anywhere. Heartbreaking, hilarious and absurd in the very best way, 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
FEBRUARY 2024 - AudioFile
Listeners will enjoy this deliciously twisted tale dynamically narrated by the author. Lozada-Oliva explores intergenerational trauma as three generations of women find themselves caught up in a zombie apocalypse. Elderly Guatemalan immigrant Candelaria kills her octogenarian boyfriend. Surrounded by chaos in Boston, she desperately and inexplicably tries to get to the Old Country Buffet over the objections of her daughter, Lucia. Unbeknownst to Candelaria, her three adult granddaughters have set the entire apocalypse in motion. Lozada-Oliva expertly manipulates her tone, cadence, and pacing to distinguish each character. Her emotional range fully conveys the predicament the women find themselves in. Using a deadpan tone, Lozada-Oliva adds levity to paradoxical situations and to witty dialogue as the audiobook touches on motherhood, familial relationships, career ambition, and male/female tension with humor and thoughtfulness. A.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-12
The debut novel from poet Lozada-Oliva shows five women’s lives undone by a strange curse.
In Boston on Christmas Eve, 83-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Candelaria chats with her daughter on the phone and moments later inexplicably knifes her own loving boyfriend in the gut. The killing seems to trigger an earthquake—or an imagined cataclysm only Candelaria can see—just before the novel flashes back to a year prior to explain the murder. Candelaria’s daughter Lucia has three daughters, Candy, Bianca, and Paola, estranged from one another and recovering from addiction, betrayal, and violence, respectively. Dark stories emerge from the family’s history, including a relative who died mysteriously in the Candelaria Caves of Guatemala. With these pulp fiction elements in place, Lozada-Oliva then delivers a gleeful but clunky schlock-fest, complete with zombies, cannibalism, body-snatcher sex, and a fertility cult with an underground lair. As an idea it should amount to raucous fun, but somehow even with all this crammed in the novel still feels padded with needless scenes to reach 300 pages. As her granddaughters reunite under dire circumstances and Candelaria guns her way through post-earthquake Boston toward an Old Country Buffet, past and present merge for a blood-soaked finale, as male characters are eaten, stabbed, hung, and one later turns into a TV. In its best moments, the book leans toward Everything Everywhere All at Once territory, but the novel has very little heart and too much of the writing feels dashed off: “The world is finite, but women are forever,” “Bianca approached the TV like it was a giant horse,” and “Life is a lifelong journey.”
A wild, inventive plot can’t hide the novel’s weak writing and lack of emotional center.
