A book a day: Lina María Parra Ochoa: The hand that heals

Year of publication: 2023

Valuation: Alright

The hand that heals It is about a family torn apart by the death of the father. It’s also about a mother and daughter who have “the powers,” and how each of them learned to use them thanks to her own intuition and the tutelage of her mentor.

It is the novelistic debut of the Colombian Lina María Parra Ochoa, and I sincerely believe that it points out ways. Ultimately, it shows that the writer knows how to present stories with emotional depth, structure them through a convenient disorder, write passages with solvency and use effective stylistic resources when she intervenes.

Even so, there is room for improvement, since there is some repetition and the voices of the different characters are not always as different as they should be. To this we must add a couple of disconcerting narrative decisions: the tendency to group ideas in a single paragraph when they would be better divided into several, certain poetic outbursts that border on pretentiousness and the late implementation of the double hyphen to indicate dialogues (if I’m not mistaken , used for the first time on page 84).

Otherwise, the story flows well. Sometimes, I insist, it can seem repetitive, and there are some scenes that provide information in a hasty manner (for example, the one in which we are told about the relationship between Ana Gregoria and Luz). However, in general everything falls into place correctly, past events are organically explained, future events are adequately anticipated and effective stylistic features are used (such as baptizing the father late to humanize him). I already said that Lina María Parra Ochoa points out ways.