Join us for Bløm’s book club! Every 6 weeks we will gather to share drinks and reflections on thought provoking books from a diverse range of authors and topics. A great way to enjoy a drink, explore new books, and to meet other bibliophiles in the Bløm community!
If you would like to join us, copies can be found at the Ann Arbor District Library, the Saline Library, the Ypsilanti Library, online, and locally. Literati has generously offered a 15% discount on copies purchased there. If you’d like to utilize this discount, simply visit/call Literati and let them know you’re part of the Bløm Book Club.
This session we will be reading The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. A National Book Award finalist, and Time Book Of The Summer, this memoir is a tour de force that explores what it means to find one’s place not only in one’s life, but in history. From the Good Reads description:
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets" the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.
This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to "the secrets."
In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
Click here to hear an interview on NPR between Contreras and Ari Shapiro, where she discusses the book, her process, and how it helped her rediscover herself after losing her memory.