Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

The Summer Of The Mariposas weaves together Aztec folklore and the Odyssey and Mexican folklore. The journey to Mexico is fraught with danger and monsters, however the girls are not without a guide - La Llorona, who is not exactly the most traditional of spirit guides, given that she’s allegedly a villain and such. They also decide to stop at their paternal grandmother’s home as well. So anyways, the girls are all, let’s go swimming when they stumble across a dead body in the water! They fish the body out and come to the consensus that they have to take the body back to Mexico to the family of the man. Their father has seemingly abandoned them, because he is terrible and arrogant and it’s been like a year since he’s contacted them. Their mother is spending all of her time working because she’s a single mom at this point. Odilla and her four sisters plan on spending most of their summer swimming at the watering hole and having a grand old time seeing as how it’s a summer without adult supervision. Also, because The Odyssey is mad awesome. I decided to make McCall’s contemporary-fantasy retelling a summer priority in order to kill two birds with one stone - read an old book from my TBR pile and thus be able to pass it on and also to remove a Netgalley book from my queue. Friends, this book sat on my Kindle and then in my house for YEARS because I can sometimes be a terrible blogger. After The Summer Of The Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall passed my threshold, I looked at it with optimism, but not much motivation. As I love that movie so much, I look at other retellings of the Odyssey with a view of optimism.

It’s such a creative, fun, musically interesting retelling.

I think my favorite Odyssey retelling of all time is the movie O Brother Where Art Thou.

Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall