I’ll admit I picked up this book without knowing quite what to expect. All I knew was that it was short, set in the arid backlands of northeastern Brazil, and that it had a giant saint’s head somewhere in the story. And honestly, that was enough to make me curious.
What it’s about
Samuel loses his mother and, following her deathbed wish, walks nearly twenty days to Candeia, a fictional town in the interior of Ceará, trying to find the grandmother he never met. The welcome is anything but warm she practically throws him out. On a stormy night, with nowhere else to go, he ends up taking shelter in a hole at the top of a hill which turns out to be the hollow head of an unfinished statue of St. Anthony, separated from the rest of the body by a construction failure that was never fixed.
That’s where everything shifts: inside that head, Samuel starts hearing the prayers of local women asking for love. At first it’s just strange. Then it becomes an opportunity with help from Francisco, the first friend he makes in town, he starts “answering” those prayers, and Candeia, which until then seemed frozen in time, slowly comes back to life as people arrive from everywhere chasing this miracle.
What I loved
What stuck with me most is how Socorro Acioli uses such a bizarre, fantastical plot to talk about things that are very real. There’s a sharp, unmissable critique of how people’s faith can be turned into a business and it’s never delivered as a dry lecture, always wrapped in a tone of humor and lightness that keeps the book from getting too heavy. You can laugh in one paragraph and feel a tightness in your chest the next, because of the abandonment Samuel carries with him.
I also loved the setting. Candeia feels real the kind of small interior town you’ve either visited or heard about, full of people with real personality, living at a pace completely different from what we’re used to. The magical realism here doesn’t feel borrowed from other authors; it feels like it was born right there, out of the backlands themselves.
What bothered me (just a little)
Honestly, I felt the ending was a bit rushed. After a book that builds everything with so much care, the final pages seem to want to resolve things too quickly things that deserved more room to breathe. It didn’t ruin the experience for me, but there’s that lingering feeling of “this could have taken a bit longer to close.”
Is it worth reading?
Yes. It’s a fast read short enough to devour in a weekend. What stayed with me afterward is the idea that the miracles in this book don’t come from any divine intervention; they come from people’s own will to believe and to act. It’s the kind of book that uses the fantastical to make you look at reality with different eyes and that, to me, is always a good enough reason to recommend it.
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