Adventures of an Adult Orphan

Benevolent spirits bring magical realism to Fajardo’s story of tracing one’s roots.

Dolores “Dorrie” Moore has always heard voices. It started with the death of her grandmother when Dorrie was a child, and at 35, Dorrie’s accrued a Greek chorus of deceased relatives opining on her life like omniscient narrators. In Anika Fajardo ’97’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore, these benevolent spirits guide Dorrie on a journey of self-discovery that brings her closer to her roots — and to the women who raised her.

“Mothers and mother figures are powerful, and that’s where the idea for this novel came from,” Fajardo said at an event at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. “[It was] born out of the memory of my own grandmother’s voice in my ear.”

It’s a deathbed promise to her mother — her last living rela- tive — that sends Dorrie from Minnesota, the only home she’s ever known, to Colombia, her birthplace, and a land as foreign to her as this new life alone. But since she’s recently laid off, newly single, and without family ties, there are few reasons for Dorrie not to trace her ancestry across the globe — and plenty of familiar voices to accompany her along the way.

“Sometimes we need to tunnel into the past in order to find our way forward,” writes author Lindsay Starck. “Anika Fajardo’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore is a vibrant, expansive, warm- hearted novel about the places that shape us, the loved ones who never leave us, and all the wrong turns that eventually bring us right back to where we belong.”

Fajardo is the author of Minnesota Book Award finalist Magical Realism for Non-Believers, a memoir of her own experience return- ing to her birthplace of Colombia and finding family. She’s also written the children’s books Meet Me Halfway and What If a Fish.

Published in the Winter 2025 issue