CANDELARIA

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.