Tere Sanchez is a 60-year-old professor in Vermont who’s been grieving the loss of life of her beloved husband. Someday she’s within the backyard, watering the peonies he planted for her lengthy earlier than his surprising loss of life, when she out of the blue realizes she’s floating in mid-air.
She panics, scrambles, kicks, and screams earlier than slowly descending again to earth, cursing this inconvenient addition to an already formidable pile of life shit to type via. On high of the grief, she’s additionally experiencing forgetfulness, bouts of confusion, and dropping observe of time. Now she’s levitating in opposition to her will, all the time on the worst occasions, making her really feel like she’s dropping her grip on actuality when not actively placing her in hurt’s approach.
Together with her college urgent her to lock down a return from her depart of absence and her son expressing fear for her way of thinking, Tere must discover a solution to cease these spells. She dives into analysis like several good tutorial would, then remembers that her household is allegedly associated to Teresa of Ávila, the medieval saint and mystic who famously claimed to levitate herself. Might this be true, or is that this simply a type of issues some distant tia made up and repeated so many occasions that everybody simply took it as truth? Earlier than anybody can discuss her out of it, Tere books a airplane ticket to Spain. She visits her cousin Isabella, a nun in Ávila, in addition to a number of websites of historic and religious significance to attempt to discover solutions, exploring the lifetime of the saint and mysticism within the course of.
However the solutions don’t come simple, nor are the solutions she does discover notably clear-cut. Tere has to determine whether or not she’ll proceed to stay a life clouded by grief, or open her coronary heart to new potentialities.
The writer, whose personal husband had a stroke whereas she was engaged on a second draft of this ebook, is a self described “Gringa-Rican” and “aging tattooed punk” who additionally grew up being instructed by her titis that she was descended from Teresa of Ávila. That is clearly a deeply private ebook for her, and I cherished attending to know Ann by way of Tere as she grappled with sophisticated emotions round grief, religion, and the packing containers society likes to position ladies of a sure age in. I’d have cherished to take a seat down and have a cafecito with Tere in Spain whereas pondering life’s mysteries and making snarky observations in regards to the church. Studying this ebook was the following smartest thing.
If you happen to’re in search of some magical realism and just a little little bit of armchair journey with a spunky, rebellious essential character getting sincere about getting old, loss, love, and magic, decide up this pleasant ebook.