Striking.

To complete The Man Who Could Move Clouds...Rojas Contreras relies...on oral history, ultimately embracing its messy, unverifiable and disjointed nature.

With Latin flavor infusing her phrasing and magic in her heritage, Rojas Contreras recalls her childhood in the conflicted, politically scarred homeland of Colombia.

The accounts in The Man Who Could Move Clouds come directly from the mouths of those who saw Sojaila appear in two places at once or witnessed Nono moving clouds. This approach to the factual reveals a fidelity to Rojas Contreras’s upbringing in a house crowded with her mother’s fortune-telling clientele that celebrated the unexplainable and surreal.

A magnificent, mesmerizing novel.

Rojas Contreras reflects on the importance of stories to her family’s well-being and their collective memory.

Enthralling.

A lyrical meditation.

Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors...as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims.