He was the first who called Paloma “Pájaro,” he called her a black bird back when she was still Gaspar, and anyone who didn’t like Muxes would follow her around, calling her Pájaro.
The cover is amazing, and it makes more sense artistically as I understood about Paloma and the word pájaro. It’s a cruelty, but people always find a way to puff themselves up by bullying others. Is Gaspar/Paloma truly a curse, born of a hex? Feliciana knows for a fact that Paloma is the only one in the family bloodline who carried the curandero blood, on her father’s side. Paloma has shared that inheritance and the mysterious teachings with her, but the journey to acceptance will not be an easy path and Paloma is schooled on being different. Gaspar/Paloma is what is known among the Zapotec as a muxe, born a boy in indigenous state of Oaxaca culture that behaves and dresses like a woman or takes on the traditional roles of women. People came to love Paloma, but never Feliciana’s grandfather who only had hardness for her, despite her healing of his own wife. But Paloma is used to the ugliness of men and still she loves them, choses them over and over again. While this book is about witches, it’s not the Hollywood sort. It is about Mexican indigenous medicine, healing, and spirituality. There are ceremonies, mushrooms, visions, a special language only the gifted healers can speak and many sorrows. It is a story of family, culture and living on one’s own terms; you know it costs a woman many things to choose her own path. What makes a woman is another dangerous exploration, one that Paloma pays the price for with her many deaths. The story is peppered with religion, devout Catholicism in Zoe’s story, how it shapes her family, the criticisms from her grandparents for her ‘wild’ sister Leandra, the tomboy and the hope that Zoe will not be a radical, will maybe have faith. The sisters grow up and apart. Leandra wants to be a designer, Zoe a journalist. There are pressures her own mother faced to get married, college not a thing to be considered, causing her to leave home at 16. It is a time of revolutionaries, of sickness and death is always looming, waiting to lay its eggs on the chosen. The dead can light the way, and Feliciana’s vision of her father is the first revelation of her calling.
The novel is told through Feliciana’s perspective, her life as the first woman healer (but even that is too simple a word to describe her skills) and Zoe’s, a journalist who has agreed to write an article about Paloma’s murder , a brutal ‘gender-based’ violence. She imagines she will be of great help, but maybe will learn that she needs healing too. Zoe enters the story green, knowing only that Feliciana is ‘the most famous shaman alive’, a curandera of the Language, who performs veladas (ceremonies) that have powers of healing proven many times over by people from all walks of life. The list includes celebrities, artists, musicians and professors that come from all around the world, to seek her help in mountains of San Felipe. Zoe isn’t one to believe in the supernatural, even if her own mother has uncanny intuition, but she is intrigued by this powerful woman who is uneducated, grew up on poverty. Feliciana, her sister, and mother didn’t know how to read or write. As we witness through the past, it is a hardworking upbringing for Feliciana and her sister, children don’t have time to play, nor do they attend school. Women’s roles are for working in the kitchen and helping with the harvest, their clothing homemade. Feliciana’s grandfather believed “idlers are like they dead, those devils bring suffering”. She is a true innocent when she is married off to Nicanor, birthing children but when he returns from war, he brings with him a taste for liquor and a hot temper. Her rotten marriage won’t be her end, though, for her future is one of renown.
As rich as Paloma and Feliciana’s past is, Zoe and Leandra’s are just as full with everything that occurs after the death of their father. How their mother is absent and then, when something occurs, is suddenly fully present. Leandra is a force, and while she has a record of bad conduct, there is something very driven, brave about her. There are similarities to Paloma, that I don’t want to give away. As Zoe reflects on her past, she deals with her wounds, and like Paloma learns how to ‘leave flowers on the battlefield of one’s life’. The forms of sickness in this novel are an honest expression of psychological and physical troubles, I think it is an important underlying theme. What happens to us, how we move forward from it, or remain trapped, is often expressed through our life journey. Moments can have a hell of an impact that echo through generations. How sickness is treated through sages is piecemeal, and so often you can miss the whole of a person.
Yes, it is hard to follow at times because Feliciana revealing the Language and her healing can feel like a riddle. You really must read it without distractions. The novel isn’t just about any one thing, yes, it is about the history of gender, a brutal crime, feminism, sexuality, the Zapotec culture, and Feliciana’s obstacles to become a healer but it is about love, family, and acceptance too. A moving tale.
Publication Date: August 16, 2022 Available Now
Catapult
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