Ingrid Rojas ContrerasReseñas

The cultural history in The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras is not one I am familiar with. The story weaves back and forth between the present to stories of the past - the author, her mother, Nono, and other relatives. After a while, I stop trying to follow the chronology and float along. With the myriad stories and the lack of a cultural context, I am not sure I completely understand the family story being told, but the tale is a fascinating mythological journey.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2024/03/the-man-who-could-move-clouds.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

This is the story of two girls in the chaotic world of Bogota, Colombia during the early 90’s when the drug lord Pablo Escobar ruled Columbia with an ungodly fist.

The first and younger of the two is Chula. She lives in a relatively safe area of Bogota while her father works for an oil company. Although her home and family seem safe, the stories surrounding her such as a girl ripped apart by a bomb, or a candidate shot down by the opposition bullets in front of herself and her mother belie the safety of their bubble.

When Chula’s mother decides to hire a maid from the lines of people standing on the street seeking work, she picks Petrona, five years older than Chula. She rejoices how cheaply she can hire someone – giving them the equivalent of daily rice and vegetables. Little does she know that Petrona’s family is almost entirely dependent on Petrona’s meager daily wage for support.

Petrona had lived on a moderately prosperous farm with her family, until it was raided by guerillas, her father and oldest brothers killed or kidnapped. Now Petrona and her family live in a shack constructed of what they can find and surrounded by people who support Pablo Escobar and the guerillas in their quest to find more justice for the working poor.

The two opposing economic and political views lead to impossible choices forced on Petrona when Chula’s family becomes their target.

While the girls’ lives have a short time of intersection, ultimately it is their class and circumstances which separate them and determine their fates.

Some of the incidents in the novel reflect Ms. Contreras's childhood experiences in Bogota. I'm sure that contributed to the immediacy and intensity of the novel.½

An enlightening memoir about life in Columbia for indigenous people and giving first-hand and believable accounts about the culanderos tradition as practiced in South America and Columbia

What a unique and well written memoir of the author's life. It is an homage to her grandfather Nono and her mother Mam.i. Ms. Contreras grew up in Columbia during a time of revolution and major drug cartels so there is always an undercurrent of danger. The family survives as Nono is known as a healer and Mami is a fortune teller of sorts.. Both are well respected in their "fields". Eventually Ms. Contreras immigrates with some of her family to the United States but she is still a creature of her "magical" background. A justly rewarded memoir

But how could we choose? The U.S. was the land that saved us; Colombia was the land that saw us emerge.
There were mathematical principles to becoming an American: you had to know one hundred historical facts, and you had to spend five uninterrupted years on North American soil. We memorized the facts, we stayed in place—but when I elevated my feet at night and my head found its pillow I wondered: of what country was I during those hours when my feet were in the air?

This wasn’t my most enjoyable read since it deals with a lot of heavy topics and I prefer books as source of escapism, but it was very well written.
From the mind of what are essentially children/young teens, it has an almost innocent feel to it. The huge contrast between this and the violent, grown up world creates a jarring contrast. I can’t deny the author’s talent and the book’s emotional impact.½

2.5 rounded up. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what this book is about. I truly don’t know. There were so many things happening yet still very little movement in the story. It had its moments but overall, it was paced unsteadily and there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense. I wanted to like it much more than I did, but unfortunately it didn’t live up to my expectations.

The book is set in Colombia in the years 1989 to 1994, the reign of Pablo Escobar, his surrender to the authorities, escape and eventual taking down by Colombian National Police. The book is a work of fiction, but the events mentioned there are real and the author took inspiration from her own childhood memories. It's told in two parallel storylines of two girls, Chula who is around 8 when the story begins, and Petrona who is 13. Petrona's family's house in the countryside has been burned down, her father and bigger brothers taken by the guerrillas. She has moved to Bogota and now lives in invasión (a shanty town) in the hills. She takes a job as a maid in Chula's family which is richer (her dad works for an oil company) and lives in a gated neighborhood. The two girls strike an unlikely friendship.

The juxtaposition of both families is most interesting. Chula's mom has Indian blood and herself comes from an invasión. She is looked down to in their gated community, while Petrona's family is allegedly of "pure" and even dignified Spanish ancestry and her little sister even has blond hair. Nevertheless, due to their status and wealth, Chula's mom can take Chula and her sister Cassandra out to the US when their dad gets kidnapped, while Petrona doesn't really have where to turn to except her guerrilla boyfriend. Chula's mom tells Petrona's mom at the end: "When there's a tempest, it comes down on all sides equally." It kind of does and it kind of doesn't.

The Kite Runner of Colombia - if you liked The Kite Runner, you will like Fruit of the Drunken Tree. I see many parallels, though Fruit of the Drunken Tree is written from the female perspective and gets more stars from me.

Wow! I came across this book during the whole American Dirt controversy. I started looking for more own voices books and found this one. Told back and forth between a wealthy family and a young girl who lives in deep poverty, it takes place during Pablo Escobar’s reign.

The young girl finds herself working for the family and befriends their young daughter. The family is trying to survive as the world around them falls into warfare with young men who are guerrillas in Escobar’s world.

The young girl has her own life to lead as well as she has lost her brothers to guerrillas and lives deep within that world. Her family is always on the brink of being invaded and taken over in their literal shack.

The issue is the young girl begins to fall for a guerrilla. Will she bring her reality into the rich family’s world?

Great storytelling with snippets of the families’ lives as they inch closer and closer together. There is always tension as you begin to guess what the young girl will do.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras is this month's pick for @theempirestatebookclub. This is a historical fiction read set in Pablo Escobar era Colombia. It was a slow burn read that leads to a heart-breaking gut punch that leaves you thinking about the characters long after you close the pages.

"So much of my life was waiting." This quote personifies the tone and pacing of this one. You see the story unravel through the eyes of 7 year old Chula, a rich girl trying to make sense of the world through observation of everything and everyone around her. She waits to see if Pablo Escobar will infiltrate her community because at home her parents instill fear in his larger than life reputation. She hides and waits observing all that she can about Petrona, the 15 year old girl hired by her mother to work at her house. As a reader you wait alongside her until it all comes boiling to the surface. As you wait, you learn: who are the victims in "drug wars", how classism and poverty affect the choices people are forced to make, whose lives are expendable and how women and children bear thr brunt of the consequences of civil unrest.

The themes in this one are what I will remember the most. The women are the backbone in the story and you see them bear the brunt of the burden when it comes to childbearing and financial responsibilities when men are absent either by choice or violence. You see women as agents of upholding or dismantling classism and patriarchy. You also see how women are abused and face violence because of political unrest.

The innocence of children is a huge part of the story. Parental influence and the perpetuation of a culture of fear create huge anxieties and trauma for children living during civil unrest. Parents often withhold truths to "protect" children and keep them alive but many times leaves them susceptible to dangerous situations.

Classism plays a huge role in the events of this novel. Poverty & lack of resources force people to make impossible choices. The rich can't see past their own problems until something happens in their backyard. Survival comes at a cost. This one forces you to take a look at what that looks like.

Read this one if you enjoy: visual storytelling styles, Latinx historical fiction, feminist stories, slow burn riveting stories, folkloric fiction and multiple point of views. The focus on women and children in this one really gave it a unique point of view. The historical aspects piqued my interest so much, I found myself researching more information. I look forward to reading Rojas Contreras memoir because I can see how much of her own family's story is contained in this one. I am eager to read more from her because the writing was really beautiful, authentic and really gave a glimpse into Colombian worldview.

Set in Colombia in the early 1990s, protagonist Chula is a young girl living with her sister and parents in Bogota’. Her father works in the oil business. They are wealthy enough to hire a teenage girl, Petrona, to help with household duties. Petrona lives in a shantytown with her mother and siblings. Chula is younger than Petrona and easily influenced. When Petrona gets involved with a guerrilla, she asks Chula to keep secrets, resulting in dangerous situations for all concerned.

This book conveys an idea of what it would have been like to live in Colombia during the heyday of drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar. It covers the assassination of politician Luis Carlos Galán, the civil unrest due to bombings and kidnappings, and infighting among the cartel, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups. It is told by an older Chula, looking back on what happened, followed by Petrona’s viewpoint. This structure is effective in enlightening the reader about how different events are interpreted by different socioeconomic groups.

The title refers to a beautiful type of tree that smells sweet but is poisonous if the fruit or flowers are ingested. It calls to mind the drugs that serve as a running theme throughout the story. Pablo Escobar was constantly in the news and thoughts of Colombians. Some viewed him as a Robin Hood type figure. Others lived in fear of narcoterrorism.

The author was born in Colombia. She is writing of her country’s traumatic history, and how it impacted families who lived there. She has written this book in a mixture of English, Spanish, and Spanglish. After finishing, I researched this choice and found out that this was intentional and is intended to depict Chula’s lack of fluency in English.

In this beautiful debut, Ingrid Rojas Contreras has assembled a cadre of authentic characters. I cared about what happened to them. It is well-crafted historical fiction that inspired me to learn more about Colombian history.

A fascinating and well-written memoir/biography/history of the author's family in Colombia. Her maternal grandfather was a curandera, and he taught her mother some of his knowledge despite it not being women's knowledge. This caused a rift in the family.

Meanwhile, the drug wars in Colombia were getting more dangerous, and her immediate family left after they received kidnapping threats against her and her sister, who were young teens at the time. Her other has high hopes that the author's own abilities can be enhanced with teaching--but the author is not very interested in the power she would have and the wielding/responsibility of it.

She and her mother returned decades later, to help her aunt with the disinternment and cremation of her grandfather. They visit family, and visit places they had lived or been to when they lived there themselves.

This is a very good book, it reminds me in many ways of The Yellow House (NBA NF winner 2019) in scope and themes, but it is also very very different in actual content.

Can't understand the hype. Nearly gave up by the 100 page mark but finished it anyways. Why I bothered, I don't know. This could have been so much better if this had been told completely from Petrona's point of view. Here she doesn't seem to have much depth and yet she was capable of so much.

This is a somewhat autobiographical story told from the POV of a 7-year-old girl in Bogotá, during drug lord Pablo Escobar’s committing domestic terrorism in Colombia. It’s a very believable rendition of how a young girl would process what’s happening in her world, believing so much rests on her small shoulders. We also see in countless ways how one man impacted nearly every person in the country, ruining and ravaging lives. A powerful read.½

I listened to the audiobook, and it was read with a spanish accent making it more realistic, but also more difficult to understand. It was difficult to follow, and I found myself going back to look up things. There were also names, especially ones beginning with a "g" that made it difficult to track. All in all, I found myself making excuses not to go back to it.

This book tells the story of 2 young girls in Columbia during Pablo Escobar's reign of terror. One of the girls, Chula, comes from a family living behind the walls of a gated community. The other, Petrona, comes into Chula's life as a maid in the house. Two girls, from two very different worlds, both victims of the violence and upheaval caused by the Cartels and the drugs.

This was the author's debut. Roja's drew from personal experience and writes a fictional account of the affect trauma can have on a child.

I cannot say I enjoyed reading this, but I am glad I did. It was a sobering read, not for the faint of heart.

fiction (residents caught between guerrilla/paramilitary conflict in Colombia)
Read to p. 172. The writing style was fine, but I lost patience with the pacing of the story--I prefer a more plot-driven story and was expecting the suspense of an unstable city to build up, but a lot of these chapters (told from the point of view from a 7-year-old girl) didn't seem to have much purpose.

The book is really well reviewed, so if you enjoy a nice, slow read (which I sometimes do, just don't have patience for now) I would recommend this.

Nice prose, with good use of a child’s naive POV to ease readers into Pablo Escobar era Colombia. While Contreras did a fine job of capturing the cultural milieu and the generalized trauma of the time, Petrona’s character motivation was underdeveloped; we weren’t privy to her inner turmoil enough to have her be the complex and sympathetic character the author likely intended. There was insufficient textual evidence to shed real light on Chula’s fixation or Petrona’s redemption, while the ending felt rushed.

During the height of the violence in Colombia, led by Pablo Escobar and the Mendellín drug cartel, seven-year-old Chula lived in a comfortable middle-class gated neighborhood in Bogota with her older sister and her parents. Her life was normal; she went to school, looked forward to her father coming home on weekends, played with her friends and became increasingly fascinated with Petrona, the family's maid, a thirteen-year-old girl living in a makeshift slum and working as the sole support for her family.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras uses a version of her own story to create a picture of life in Colombia in the late eighties and early nineties. While Chula and her family live a fairly normal life, albeit one full of the stresses of potential danger and careful following of news of where it is safe to go and where to avoid, Petrona's life is far different. Her brothers disappear into the paramilitaries and life in the Invaciones is treacherous. As time goes by, the political situation remains dangerous and in a moment, Petrona holds the key to the family's survival.

This novel is mainly interesting for how it describes daily life in Colombia during a specific era. Seen through the eyes of a young girl who doesn't always understand what she is witnessing, but written from the perspective of someone looking back, worked well with what the author was doing here. Daily life goes on, even during the most precarious of times.½

Enchanting!

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Author), Marisol Ramirez, and Almarie Guerra, using Libby through my library. An audiobook was a good way to experience this book in the appropriate Spanish accents.

Around the year in 52 books challenge notes:
#12. A book that is a collaboration between 2 or more people

A beautiful, beautiful book.

Twists and turns, insights and colorful characters. This is a great read. The writer's skill in depicting a scene and telling a story with full-bodied characters is admirable. But her finesse in delivering pathos through a child's point of view is remarkable. highly recommended.

The narrative of Fruit of the Drunken Tree shifts between the perspectives of two young girls. Chula is a seven year old child of an upper middle class family who lives in a gated community in Bogota. While Petrona is a teenager who works as the family's housekeeper and lives in a hovel in a poor neighborhood. The use of dual perspectives creates a more complete picture of the environment in Columbia in the Escobar era where bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations were commonplace.

During most of the novel, Chula narrates her story as a child. This provides a freshness and naivete in the face of sinister news; it helps to build the suspense as their environment gradually becomes more and more dangerous. Throughout the story the author creates believable characters that this reader could empathize with as events turned worse for the family. It did not help them that there was class prejudice in their neighborhood based on the presence of "Indian blood" in Chula's mother.

Supernatural elements (witches, ghosts, tarot cards) permeate the narrative in Fruit of the Drunken Tree. These provide a more comprehensive experience of the atmosphere where Chula and her family lived. Several incidents in the story raise danger and combine to lead Chula, her sister, and Mother to emigrate to the United States. This experience, while difficult for the family, is accomplished with great strength as they stay together as a unit even while reacting in their own individual ways.

The young girl, Petrona, says early in the story that "I want to be normal for once, why can't I?"(p 140). This is something that all the characters in this story face, for there is no "normal" for them during a time of turmoil. One of the most emotional moments was when Chula realized she would never see her home again as she left with her family. Anyone who has had to leave their childhood home, never to return, has at least some idea of how this feels. Contreras' novel is an exceptional story of growing up in a time of turmoil and ultimately creating a new life in a world you never dreamed of.½

This is a fictionalized account of a childhood in Venezuela and immigration to the U.S. The central character is five when the book opens. We learn, as she learns, what it is like to live in a nation with a huge gap between the wealthy and the desperately poor, and a powerful and lawless narco-gang. Her relationship with the young girl they have hired as a servant brings to mind the film "Roma." but is a much more fraught relationship. I found it a good read and helpful in understanding the dangers and fear that lead people living in authoritarian and violent nations to seek asylum in the U.S.

Digital audiobook performed by Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra and Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

Based on the author’s own life experiences, this novel tells the story of a family “safely” ensconced within their gated community in Bogotá, Columbia in the early to mid 1990s. Chula, the 7-year-old narrator, and her older sister Cassandra enjoy a relatively carefree life within the community. But just outside the walls of their compound, the infamous, and seemingly all powerful, drug lord Pablo Escobar continues his reign of terror with kidnappings, car bombs and assassinations.

I loved that Contreras used two different young women (girls, really) to narrate this story. The viewpoint alternates between Chula and Petrona, who is the family’s teen-aged maid. Chula has a naivete and innocence of youth, and of her upbringing in a relatively safe, secure and stable (if isolated) environment. Petrona, on the other hand, has suffered the indignities and deprivations of the poor and uneducated. The oldest of nine children who live in a slum, she has taken on the burden of being the breadwinner for her family at the tender age of thirteen. The way these two narrators see what is happening in their country is colored by their experiences – each of them having a limited viewpoint for different reasons. And those limitations make them vulnerable to manipulation, and result in some dangerous situations.

I was completely immersed and engaged in their story from beginning to end. Having both viewpoints I recognized the danger long before either of the narrators, but was still caught off guard a few times as twists and turns occurred in the plot. For the time I spent with these characters I had a glimpse of the uncertainty the citizens of Columbia must have felt.

It’s a strong debut for Contreras and I look forward to reading her future works.

The audiobook was masterfully performed by Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra and Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Brava, ladies.

The vibrant cover of Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras gives no hint of the heartbreak and violence that lies in this story of two girls forced to grow up way too soon by a conflict that they do not understand. Set in a turbulent Bogota, Colombia, this book is based on an imagining of what did not but could have happened in the author's own life. The book is slow reading, but the characters are heartbreaking.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2019/04/fruit-of-drunken-tree.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.