Book Review for River of Love by Juliana Aragon Fatula

Dear Reader,

I’m writing this book review for a writer very special to me. She invited me to Dillon Beach, CA to help her workshop her book, River of Love. I’m so proud to announce her release date is Sept. 24th 2019 but her book can be preordered at Homebound Press online.

This is her first novel. River of Love won an award last year and the prize was to publish her book at Homebound Press. We will be meeting in April to celebrate many things but mostly to congratulate Aimee for her hard work and dedication to fulfilling a dream.

Those of you who know me will be interested to know that I play a character in the story, Cha Cha and Rose are tight as thieves and this is their story of coming of age in a little Colorado town in the 70’s. It’s a love story and much more. This book tells stories and cuentos and dichos and wisdom from the master writers.

We’ve been work shopping her novel via email. I’ve learned a great deal about editing, writing, publishing, submitting, revising, and marketing with Aimee.  She has taught me how to do many things and she encourages me to keep writing. We push each other to write and write well.

We never dreamed we’d both be published authors when we were passing notes in high school. Forty  years later and it’s never too late to follow your dreams. I hope my readers here at Stiletto Gang will give  her book a read and support  a woman of color trying to break into the publishing world. I read the advanced reader copy from cover to cover in 24 hours. I couldn’t put the book down. I fell asleep, woke up and finished the last few pages this morning. It’s so exciting to hold her book in my hands for the first time and read the words she crafted to tell her story.

I read until I couldn’t read one more word, and then I read one more page, and one more after that. I was in the zone. The interesting part of this read for me was the fact that I had read this in draft form several times but now it was polished. It was beautiful, brilliant, magical, and inspiring. I fell in love with the author. Then I remembered I had loved her for decades. She appeared in the pages as a young woman and took me on her journey through life. As a piece of fiction it is delicious, because I know the back story and history of the author, it is intriguing. She took characters from our past and created a sense of nostalgia for those people and that era. The seventies represented the sexual revolution for most women. Birth control and the right to choose helped women make their own choices and control their own bodies. What a concept.

There were chapters that made me miss my ancestors who have gone to the next world, but also gave me a sense of the history we are part of. We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.

I sent a copy to my nieces in Denver, Colorado. I knew they would enjoy learning a fictional story about their roots in New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Aimee Medina Carr wrote the River of Love to capture our families histories. It’s part memoir, love story, and awakening of spirit and wisdom. It’s a great read for young girls and might help someone struggling with life decisions about motherhood, career, sisterhood, the power of women, mujeres muy mujeres.

I’ll continue on this great novel, Aimee’s first, and divulge more teases of her great lines. She truly is a poet and a lyricist. She writes from a place in her heart that is pure love.

As for the wedding in April in Santa Cruz. It was the most spectacular wedding I’ve ever attended. The love is evident in every single photo. The garden and the view made the trip well worth the week of travel. We also caught a few incredible vistas through farmland and vineyards.

I love my sister, Aimee Medina Carr. I hope you pre-order her book at Homebound Publications and find the story you seek in River of Love.