Carranza offers a poetry collection about personal growth that honors a beloved pet and companion.

The author opens this compilation with a series of dedications to her family, readers, doctors, mentors, teachers, healers, and, most of all, to her late Schnauzer, Sunny. Carranza’s journey is one of growth and healing from a point of deep trauma, and she relates how Sunny was an important source of support for her, up until his death in 2023. Some of the most meaningful times they spent together were on the beach in Port Aransas, Texas. As such, the first half of Carranza’s collection focuses on the sea. After opening with an elegy to Sunny, the “Echoes of the Ocean” section frequently uses dolphins as a symbol of wisdom, joy, and love. While other sea creatures do feature in the text—as in “Octopus” and “A Whale’s Song of Sorrow”— Carranza returns to dolphins as a subject repeatedly. In “Dolphin Love Pod,” a crew of dolphins are described protecting and loving each other in a celebration of family; in “Whispers of the Past,” the speaker looks back on her youth and her nostalgia-drenched memories of watching dolphins play. A series of the author’s paintings bridge these early poems and “Rising Tides, Rising Spirit,” a more directly personal section that speaks to the healing power of love and transformation. Carranza is unafraid to approach difficult themes, from miscarriage in “A Modern-Day Fairytale” to adverse childhood experiences in “Unbroken Spirit” and “Rising Above,” among others. The collection closes with “Golden Wings,” a poem about rising from “ashes of tragedy” and embracing newfound strength.

Carranza’s poetry clearly comes from an incredibly personal and heartfelt place. The topic of love is a thread woven throughout the book, and it allows the speakers to grant forgiveness and preserve their spirit as they fight to overcome past struggles. The paintings and photographs that appear throughout also provide insight into the poet herself. Particularly powerful lines include “I realized that I am not the sum of my mother’s fears” in “The Weight of Legacy” and ”I was free, / Released to loved ones, clinging to deity” in “The Queen of Angels.” Readers may wish, though, that the first half of the collection were better connected to the second. Although there are some shared themes, the focus on dolphins and the sea more generally do little to prepare the reader for the tonal shift in the second half. The first part of the book also struggles to adequately portray the journey of transformation in the rest of the collection. With more curation, the overriding themes of “Echoes of the Ocean” and “Rising Tides, Rising Spirit” might have resonated more clearly. More experimentation with poetic form might also have added more nuance. The vast majority of the works here use a similar, rigid poetic structure. Although such constraints can serve as an aid in shaping a collection, more variety might have offers a chance to explore new perspectives.

A brave and emotional poetic effort, hampered by uneven presentation.

An author and health coach divulges how she overcame abuse and physical and mental anguish to emerge as a strong, compassionate individual.

In her own words, Carranza’s epiphanic debut memoir unfolds “like the plot of a Lifetime miniseries or a telenovela.” And in many ways, it does. She writes frankly about her childhood in Mexico. According to the author, she faced undisciplined sibling abuse at the hands of her older sister while trying to come to terms with a distant mother who “never said the words I desperately needed to hear.” These problems spurred years of deteriorating self-esteem and suicide attempts. Despite the doting adoration of her grandparents and uncle, Carranza felt less than loved. As she matured, her descent into debilitating depression continued after a teenage miscarriage, even while the bond with her father strengthened. The writer’s world crumbled further after her father was brutally murdered at age 43 and she was left with unanswered questions and unprocessed grief well into her adult years. In Carranza’s 20s, while modeling, acting, and carelessly becoming involved with kingpins in the local drug cartel, she entered into what she describes as a seven-year horrifically abusive marriage. Thankfully, she found benevolence and became buoyed by her “Earth angels,” individuals who provided solace, guidance, and unconditional friendship. During the nearly fatal birth of her daughter, the author experienced an extraordinary spiritual vision in which Mary Magdalene appeared before her, reinforcing the message that “if I was strong enough and walked through the fire with love, hope, and faith, I’d make it” and “find Heaven on Earth.” As she relates in her moving book, this ethereal episode prompted her to finally end her tortured marriage and rediscover happiness despite a barrage of physical challenges that lay ahead, including kidney problems and her daughter’s teenage battle with Hashimoto’s disease. Fighting through the fear and shame of a botched childhood, Carranza finally reached a catharsis and emerged as a wholly complete, if weathered, “lioness,” who, as the title suggests, believed that “our lives are like the life of a butterfly.” She also shares what she has found to be the “keys to Heaven on Earth,” which should be profoundly motivational and inspiring to readers in a similar situation as the author. Suffused with painful vulnerability, her emotionally raw and vividly written narrative is bifurcated between the angst of a melancholic life and the lush, poetic revelations that eventually superseded all the darkness that came before it. The chapters in Carranza’s memoir read like emotionally acute diary entries dictating the ebb and flow of a life overcome by tragedy yet ultimately yielding to the light of a new day with endless opportunities to reinvigorate love, perseverance, faith, and joy.  

Poignant and powerfully affirmative, this account offers an intensive reading experience that should particularly appeal to readers who find themselves unfairly battered by circumstances and the cruel slings and arrows of life.