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I grew up in a ver y small town, surrounded by women . . . 5 sisters, many tias, many comadres of my mother. So being female, and keeping a sisterhood around me for moral and emotional support played a big role in my life. The bond of sisters is special and critical for women to cultivate.
-Guadalupe García McCall, "Your work"
In an e-mail exchange with the Chicana young adult novelist, Guadalupe García McCall, the writer expressed the positive influence that strong relationships between women, especially sisters, have played in her writing life. Not surprisingly, then, bonds of sisterhood and mother-daughter relationships take center stage in her most recent novel, Summer of the Mariposas (2012), which describes one summer in the life of a young Chicana named Odilia and her four younger sisters, who find a dead man floating in their favorite swimming hole in Eagle Pass, Texas. In a text that has been described by the writer as a contemporary Chicana revision of The Odyssey ("Your work" and "Q & A"), the novel delves into an exciting, chaotic story of the five sisters' attempts to return the dead man to his family in México. Indeed, for García McCall, Summer of the Mariposas is a much needed gesture to insert her very readers, young Chicanas and Latinas, into a world of adventure and knowledge that may be closed off to them because of static, rigid gender norms1. Stealing their estranged father's old car without so much as a note to their newly single mother, Rosalinda, the sisters embark on a road trip across the Mexican border, and along the way, they encounter Mexican mythical characters such as La Llorona, El Nagual, El Chupacabras, La Lechuza, and La Virgen de Guadalupe2; it is these strange occurrences that provide the bulk of the plot. With a comic twist as well, the sisters find themselves reported missing by their mother, thereby having to dodge the media attention their disappearance has caused. In addition to the folk characters, the novel also weaves popular Mexican rhymes from the well-known game, lotería, which function as foreshadowing of plot details to come.
While a recent addition to the field of young adult literature, García McCall's works are part of a well-established...