Calling Dolores
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Book Overview
Dolores Del Leon was born with an enlarged heart, a name that means pain, and a soul who had very strong opinions about how her story should be told.
Calling Dolores is a novel unlike most you will encounter. It shifts between voices - Dolores narrating her own birth, her soul taking over when Dolores gets in the way, and a journal that surfaces from the deep when words are the only thing left. It moves between timelines without apology, from 1967 to midlife crisis to a magical underground cave, because that is how memory actually works and how transformation actually feels - not in a straight line, but in a spiral that keeps returning you to the same place until you finally see it differently.
If you are the kind of reader who is willing to be carried by a current rather than walked down a path, this book will take you somewhere real.
At its heart, Calling Dolores is the story of a Latina woman - daughter of a depressed veteran and a fierce, complicated mother - who spent forty-five years treating her creativity, her desires, and her own worthiness as problems to be solved rather than gifts to be received. It is about what happens when the soul finally gets tired of waiting and takes matters into her own hands.
It is also, frequently, very funny.
Magical realism meets spiritual memoir in a voice that is wholly original - part Sandra Cisneros, part Anne Lamott, part something that has no name yet because Alma de la Melena Cox invented it.
For the woman who has everything she asked for and is still, somehow, standing at the window wondering if she's allowed to want more.
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