ELECTRIC SHAMANS AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE SUN, the most truth-telling title of 2026

ELECTRIC SHAMANS AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE SUN
MÓNICA OJEDA (tr. Sarah Booker)
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, preorder for delivery 12 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival’s so-called “celebration of life.” Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sunblends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sarah Booker, the translator whose job it was to make this...tale...accessible to Anglophone audiences, has The Best Job Ever. She and the Coffee House Press acquisitions team get to read good stuff all the time, most of which will never see US publication for a variety of reasons, and we on the outside will never know even exist. Translator Booker has the hard, intense job of creating in English (a very slippery tool, English, full of landmines and tiger-traps for translators) a story told in Spanish that's already sui generis. (Read the Spanish-language reviews on Goodreads, most mention how poetic/beautiful the language is.)

Starting a story at a music festival (I recommend googling the names of the musicians throughout the book, it's most instructive) is quite a flex. It's a loud, raucous thing by design, so having your characters start our acquaintance in such an intense and auditorily overwhelming way is going to sort the audience into pro and con very quickly. I suspect most people who liked Jawbone and/or Nefando will be averse to this intense introduction to our PoV women. I don't know if enough people are already on the Ojeda/Booker train to make that a sizable market but I sure as hell hope so...I want more.

After the characters are charged with the passionate energy that a music festival imparts to those willing to receive it, they begin the Hero's Journey to that gorgeous and mystical place, the Andes Mountains, for shamanic enlightenment. If you have never been to Cuzco or Machu Picchu, please make at least those places destination priorities. I found the evocation of place in this part of the tale we're investing in to be stellar, even better than the more divisive music festival with its more chaotic and uncontrolled atmosphere.

The common element of both segments of the tale, musical and mystical, are overcoming the breakage that a brutal and uncaring world inflicts on us all, and submerging into an overwhelming Otherness to find the path through the noise and pain of Life. It's done in the musical mode of counterpoint, so it unites seemingly disparate modes by their very difference.

I'm really not sure how better to explain the affect of the read than to say it helps to think of the gestalt as an opera libretto, structured to an underlying music that never stops and always leads you forward. The effect of this use of a constant, if quiet, through line is to make the crescendos hit harder, feel louder, than you expect them to be. Invest in Noa and her dad, accept the antiphonal others, and this read will propel you into the shamanic journey's end-point you didn't necessarily see coming.