OUR LADY OF THE LITTLE SHOE

ISBN: 978-1-938900-48-8
Release date: Spring 2023
Perfect-bound
90 pages, 5.3” x 7”
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SYNOPSIS

Our Lady of the Little Shoe documents Carolina Margarita’s experience of her father’s kidnapping in Venezuela in 2009. Written in a chronological, journal-like form, Carolina’s memoir captures the fear and pain of her father’s absence while exploring the comfort offered by her community and Doctor Yaso, a group of humanitarian clowns she belongs to. While she explores the nine-month period surrounding her father’s kidnapping, Carolina’s prose also traces her father’s absence beyond his kidnapping, back to his absence from her childhood home. As her family, friends, and Doctor Yaso’s volunteers help Carolina and her siblings raise funds to pay her father’s ransom, she finds hope in the “Sad Virgin Mary”—the traditional Catholic image of the Virgin Mary—and “Our Lady of the Little Shoe”—the group’s fictitious patron saint of clowning. Our Lady of the Little Shoe is a memoir about overcoming tragedy and violence through the beauty of family, community, and play.

PRAISE

Carolina Margarita writes with such love and precision about the questions and terrors of life today in South America. In these pages, you will find clowns and kidnappers and men, both young and old. This is nothing short of a tender probing into how people navigate the choices offered to them.

—Daisy Hernandez, author of The Kissing Bug and A Cup of Water Under My Bed

AUTHOR

Carolina Margarita works as the Global Communications Lead for a global environmental coalition, and her proudest achievements include co-creating a foundation in Venezuela that inspired a movie that premiered at the Miami Film Festival, receiving the Effective Advocate award by Amnesty International, building Spanish-language capacity for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), volunteering as a humanitarian clown in high-risk areas, and being one of the PEN America Emerging Voices finalists. Her writing career is just starting, but she already has a couple of ideas in mind for future endeavors.

DESIGNER

Book design by Sandra Rosales.