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We’re excited to share our March Book Club pick: The Man Who Could Move Clouds. This book explores themes of colonialism and generational trauma, but it also reminds us of the power of healing through tradition and passed down storytelling. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a moving memoir that we’re sure our Villagers will love.Our March Book Club meeting date is March 29th, 2026 in-store at 12:30 p.m. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the book! Join us anyway and learn about this compelling read with other book lovers like you.
Summary:
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, the extraordinary was part of everyday life. She grew up in Colombia during the political unrest of the 1980s and ’90s, in a home alive with her mother’s fortune-telling clients and stories that blurred the line between the living and the dead. Her grandfather, Nono, was a legendary curandero—a healer believed to possess “the secrets,” including the ability to communicate with spirits, foresee the future, heal the sick, and even move the clouds. Her mother inherited these powers as well, astonishing friends and family with feats that felt both miraculous and matter-of-fact.
For years, this mystical lineage felt like it belonged to the generations before her. Then, in her twenties, while living in the U.S., Rojas Contreras suffered a traumatic head injury that left her with amnesia. As her memories slowly returned, her family revealed a startling truth: the same thing had happened to her mother decades earlier. After recovering from her own memory loss, Mami had awakened to “the secrets.”
Driven by unanswered questions, recurring dreams shared among her mother and aunts, and a deep need to reclaim her past, Rojas Contreras returns to Colombia with her mother in 2012. Together, they embark on a journey to exhume her grandfather’s remains and trace their family’s origins. Along the way, she uncovers Indigenous and Spanish roots shaped—and fractured—by colonial violence, revealing a family divided between those who see their mystical inheritance as a blessing and those who fear it as a curse.
Blending spellbinding family lore, reexamined Colombian history, and an intimate exploration of memory and belief, The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a moving meditation on storytelling as a form of healing—and an invitation to consider the magic we inherit, whether we believe in it or not.
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