Locks, Hooks and Books: Blog Tour and Spotlight: Leonor by Paula Delgado-Kling

COLOMBIAN NATIVE PENS COMPELLING TRUE STORY ABOUT

FORMER CHILD SOLDIER

Leonor Depicts Toll Colombian Violence Takes on Children

In Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood, Paula Delgado-Kling takes us to her homeland, Colombia, where she finds answers to the country’s drug wars by examining the life of Leonor, a former child soldier in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once a deadly cocaine-trafficking group on the U.S. State Department’s terrorism list.

The author followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active FARC member forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days, as the mom of two girls.

Leonor’s immense resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances helped her carve a space for herself in the FARC, a world dominated by males. She is beautiful, and by honing her powers of seduction, Leonor created a parallel world where she made herself a protagonist. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was a victim. For half a lifetime, she regarded herself as “the First Lady of the Southern Bloc” and exploited any power she fabricated for herself to stay alive.

Colombia’s violence also touched the author’s family. The idea for this nonfiction narrative began with the question: why was Paula Delgado-Kling’s brother kidnapped, and why were his guards teenagers?

“I wrote this book because when I was in graduate school, I heard the term ‘failed state’ in reference to my family’s home, Colombia, and I wished to find out for myself what that meant. I quickly realized children were the invisible casualties of this conflict,” explains Paula Delgado-Kling.

This incredible book is the author’s way to reconnect with Colombia and to understand why she had not been able to grow up in the country. When Delgado-Kling was nine years old, her family had to quickly uproot and move to Toronto, Canada because a rebel group, the M-19, was plotting to kidnap one of them, possibly her. Colombia’s current president and those close to him were part of the M-19, and they robbed her of her right to grow up free in her own country.

Delgado-Kling nurtured her relationship with Leonor for nearly two decades and was able to develop a kinship with this former member of a terrorist organization. Leonor is a truly fascinating account of life in Colombia and the struggles of war victims, especially women and children.

To learn more about the book and the author, please visit: PaulaDelgadoKling.com.

About the Author

Paula Delgado-Kling holds degrees in comparative literature/French civilizations, international affairs, and creative writing from Brown University, Columbia University, and The New School, respectively. Leonor, for which she received two grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts, is her first book. Excerpts of this book have appeared in Narrative, The Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and Happano.org in Japan. Her work for the Mexican monthly news magazine Gatopardo was nominated for the Simon Bolivar Award, Colombia’s top journalism prize, and anthologized in Las Mejores Crónicas de Gatopardo (Random House Mondadori, 2006). Born in Bogota, Colombia and raised in Toronto, Canada, Delgado-Kling now resides in New York City. To learn more, please visit PaulaDelgadoKling.com.