There are moments that divide a life into a before and an after. For Paloma, one of them arrives in a doctor's office, with a word no one is ever prepared to hear. Cancer. But this is not where her story begins. Long before illness entered her life, Paloma had learned how to endure. She learned to read a room before speaking, to make herself smaller when the world around her became too loud, to carry pain without becoming a burden, and to answer I'm fine even when she wasn't.
She survived love and betrayal, motherhood and loss, difficult bonds and the quiet wounds no one else could see. She became very good at being strong. Then her body asked something different of her. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, fear, laughter, family, exhaustion, and the strange tenderness of allowing others to care for her, Paloma begins to discover that strength is not always measured by how much we can withstand. Sometimes it lives in admitting that something hurts. In accepting the hand that reaches for us. In allowing ourselves to be seen when we would rather disappear. Paloma: The Strength to Overcome is an intimate and deeply human novel about the scars we carry, the people who shape us, and a woman who spent much of her life learning how to survive before discovering something far more difficult: how to let herself live.