A young woman traverses the underworld of Los Angeles, running from her past, when she faces an evil force who wants to consume her, and the world at large; jolting her awake, this forces her to follow the guidance of an ancestor's paranormal presence, across the United States, undergoing a civil war, all the way to New York, and finally back to her island of Puerto Rico, where she must, for the last time, defeat the darkness threatening to destroy all she holds dear.

SYNOPSIS:

This is a fiction novel, inspired by real life events I lived, witnessed, lived and encountered throughout the course of my nomadic years in the United States, Europe and Puerto Rico. It can be found on Amazon Kindle by late February 2026, open to offers to film production.

Julia Jimenez has grown up in Puerto Rico, living with her mother, and under the shadow of lies, secrecy and trauma from her family’s past, yet she harbors a big dream of going to Hollywood and becoming a major film star. On the eve of her high school graduation, her mother takes her up to the sacred mountain top El Yunque, and leads her to a hidden, magical waterfall, in which she must immerse herself, and meet someone.

Out of the island, Julia studied acting in New York city, and is confronted with the prejudices and racial stereotypes many people have about Puerto Rican women, and feels attacked, unloved, and rejected by the very teachers and peers she so desperately wants to please. So, after graduation, and a brief time spent in the Carolinas, where she meets a man willing to love her, but keep her there, she drives off in the early hours of the morning, toward Los Angeles, and decides to go by a different name.

In Los Angeles, everything seems to be like sand falling through her fingers. Working at a restaurant, she meets a man who says he’s a producer, who offers her a job as his assistant, and giving in to her desperation, ambition, and disdain for the slow and rocky climb she finds her career on, she accepts, quits her job, abandons her apartment, and allows him to convince her to open credit cards. He cons her, and gets away from her, leaving her in debt, homeless and broken.

At this point Julia begins having a relationship with a man she had met before, and lives with him, finding herself jobless and homeless. It is a transactional relationship, masked as love, as she quickly discovers he does not love her, forgetting about her one night, and forcing her to leave, and face the full consequences of the lies she has passed as her reality.

Inevitably she gets a job as a shop girl, still going by her pseudo actress name, and situates herself in a loft in downtown L.A with roommates, when she is meets a photographer, whom she believes can help her break into the right circles, who she believes loves her, but quickly, she finds her body and her soul belonging more and more to something not her, to a dark source, and as the man has her in his grasp, weak, spineless, and defeated, he begins to emotionally berate her, but not physically. At a Halloween party, where the photographer almost forces himself on her, and as he abandons her for a moment, a strange man approaches her, and all of a sudden, she begins to have a metaphysical, paranormal experience, where she sees who the people actually are, where she actually is, and the man in front of her, is the devil. Simultaneously, a female spirit, Adelaida shows up, helping her find her light within.

After she saves herself from this first test point, breaking free of the first dark chain, she runs, and decides to leave L.A, by bus, at the same time as the city is fraught with civil riots, racial warfare, and political strife. As she boards her bus on a cross country trip to New York, where she will finally see her estranged grandpa, via dreams and visions, Adelaida begins to tell her story, as her great great grandma, of her life on the brink of twentieth century Puerto Rico.

The cross country bus trip has a boiling point, where the driver must stop the bus at the edge of Texas, and a mob of racist right wingers almost kill the passengers, but Julia finds her courage, and saves them, with the help of Adelaida and her bus friend, Ana, and they make it out alive, and finally into Port Authority, New York City, a few days later.

Julia meets three men thanks to her bus friend, Ana, who become essential players in her future, as she is attracted to one, Alejandro, and is repugned by the other, Roberto.

Julia is embraced by her grandpa, and for one week she stays with him, and during the course of the week, she shares her life with him, and he shines a light on why he was hated by her mother and grandmother, and the truth about why he left, and what he did.

She makes it out of New York to Puerto Rico, on a plane, and almost dies as a bomb lands on Florida, and the world may come to an end. Down in Puerto Rico, after years, Julia heals herself, her relationship with her mother, her female lineage is freed thanks to her bravery, as she embodies her own spirit, united with Alejandro, and in one final test, shows Roberto, she is not afraid, and once and for all, vanquishes the evil within her.

In the end, Julia and Alejandro are together, and they have a daughter, Adelaida, and live in Barcelona, where she lives as a writer, and knows, she is, the woman from the island…