Tere Sanchez is a 60-year-old professor in Vermont who’s been grieving the death of her beloved husband. One day she’s in the garden, watering the peonies he planted for her long before his unexpected death, when she suddenly realizes she’s floating in mid-air.
She panics, scrambles, kicks, and screams before slowly descending back to earth, cursing this inconvenient addition to an already formidable pile of life shit to sort through. On top of the grief, she’s also experiencing forgetfulness, bouts of confusion, and losing track of time. Now she’s levitating against her will, always at the worst times, making her feel like she’s losing her grip on reality when not actively putting her in harm’s way.
With her university pressing her to lock down a return from her leave of absence and her son expressing worry for her state of mind, Tere needs to find a way to stop these spells. She dives into research like any good academic would, then remembers that her family is allegedly related to Teresa of Ávila, the medieval saint and mystic who famously claimed to levitate herself. Could this be true, or is this just one of those things some distant tia made up and repeated so many times that everyone just took it as fact? Before anyone can talk her out of it, Tere books a plane ticket to Spain. She visits her cousin Isabella, a nun in Ávila, as well as several sites of historical and spiritual significance to try and find answers, exploring the life of the saint and mysticism in the process.
But the answers don’t come easy, nor are the answers she does find particularly clear-cut. Tere has to decide whether she’ll continue to live a life clouded by grief, or open her heart to new possibilities.
The author, whose own husband had a stroke while she was working on a second draft of this book, is a self described “Gringa-Rican” and “aging tattooed punk” who also grew up being told by her titis that she was descended from Teresa of Ávila. This is clearly a deeply personal book for her, and I loved getting to know Ann via Tere as she grappled with complicated feelings around grief, faith, and the boxes society likes to place women of a certain age in. I would have loved to sit down and have a cafecito with Tere in Spain while pondering life’s mysteries and making snarky observations about the church. Reading this book was the next best thing.
If you’re looking for some magical realism and a little bit of armchair travel with a spunky, rebellious main character getting honest about aging, loss, love, and magic, pick up this delightful book.