Her voice is more powerful—and magical—than she ever imagined.
Consider these songs a mixtape, a disco de amor for the country I love.
May these songs find you, mis panas, wherever you are.
So you, like me, will carry Venezuela in your heart.
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Twenty songs. Twenty songs that take him back twenty years—to a country that no longer exists. Not really, anyway.
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When Venezuelan asylum seeker Rafa De Rojas gives his pregnant wife a playlist of Venezuelan music, he doesn’t know he'll soon be detained by ICE. Each song pulls him back to 2007, when he worked alongside sixteen-year-old Luz Sánchez on her family's dairy farm in rural Venezuela.
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Luz has little patience for seventeen-year-old Rafa, who knows more about heavy metal than milking a cow. Sure, their fathers are best friends, but that doesn't make Rafa family. She has learned to live with her epilepsy—until the local bruja insists her seizures are something more. Whenever Luz sings, impossible things happen: animals respond, crowds gather, and moments tip beyond her control. When she and Rafa are invited to a beachside quinceañera in the cacao town of Chuao, Luz learns that loving out loud, in a country silencing its own voices, is both dangerous and necessary.
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In the present, detained and separated from his American wife, Rafa faces deportation and the possibility of missing his child’s birth. Pressured to self-deport and return to the regime he once fled, he can either sign away his future—or remain and fight for the chance to raise his child and pass on the songs of his homeland.
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SING VENEZUELA is an 80,000-word upmarket novel with strong book club appeal. Told in dual POVs across two timelines, the novel follows a Venezuelan asylum seeker facing detention in the United States and the teenage girl whose voice once altered the course of his family's life. It blends the romantic sweep of The Stationery Shop with the diasporic intimacy of Infinite Country, and the contemporary political urgency of Olga Dies Dreaming.​
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This novel was co-written by a husband-and-wife team who write under a shared pseudonym. Our work has been published in the Hispanic literary magazine Letralia, Tierra de Letras and Caracas Chronicles, the most respected English-language Venezuelan news publication.
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#Latinx #OwnVoices
