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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 26, 2023
Rounded up to three stars for Muir's evocative descriptions of places and food, but this is rather generous of me. I had previously read her excellent gothic, The Smiling Medusa, and so was pretty excited for this one, but it just didn't measure up. For starters, this book is a mystery about a missing child set in Mexico - despite this (newer edition) cover, I don't think it qualifies as a gothic at all, so that was disappointing. I hate when publishers try to trick you with things like that to fill a genre niche. Our heroine, Prudence DeJong, makes questionable decisions all the way through this tale. Left without a date to a grand Mexico City ball, she jumps at the chance to go with a strange man her friend's husband picked up at a bar for her. This man soon proves to be a complete tool IMO, but Prudence is fascinated by him and takes his story about trying to track down the long-lost kid at face value, agreeing to abandon her vacation plans to travel with him elsewhere and question random people, routinely putting herself in danger. Girl why??? I would have just rolled my eyes at another harebrained heroine and kept reading, but the plot goes mostly downhill from there as they race to find the missing child and ends with a "twist" that surprised me exactly zero percent. At times I enjoyed, but other times I wanted to toss it on the floor. I'm sad there aren't more Muir books for me to try given how good "Medusa" was!
October 24, 2025
Total fun romp!
A smidge culturally insensitive at times? Yeah.
Is it really a romance? Not in my mind. The handsome man we spend the most time with doesn't turn out to be "the one" and the one who is initially painted as quite a scoundrel turns out to be a good dude. Honestly, the romance aspect was a total dud but that's not why I'm still giving this book three stars.
Muir's story is, in my opinion, the very definition of escapism. A short read that kicks off with a classic premise: young woman in an unfamiliar environment. Her only two friends are, conveniently, out of the way most of the story. She's left to her own decisions and a taste for adventure. Muir does a beautiful job of capturing how different Mexico feels. How wide and bright and, sometimes, to a foreigner, very strange. We're out in Oaxaca and there's nothing but heat, dusty roads, and mountains. This book felt like might have starred Grace Kelly in the mid-sixties. Rock Hudson and Burt Lancaster. Rock star cast. Hitchcock directs it. And you sit down on a Friday night with a big bowl of popcorn, ready to get romped.
A smidge culturally insensitive at times? Yeah.
Is it really a romance? Not in my mind. The handsome man we spend the most time with doesn't turn out to be "the one" and the one who is initially painted as quite a scoundrel turns out to be a good dude. Honestly, the romance aspect was a total dud but that's not why I'm still giving this book three stars.
Muir's story is, in my opinion, the very definition of escapism. A short read that kicks off with a classic premise: young woman in an unfamiliar environment. Her only two friends are, conveniently, out of the way most of the story. She's left to her own decisions and a taste for adventure. Muir does a beautiful job of capturing how different Mexico feels. How wide and bright and, sometimes, to a foreigner, very strange. We're out in Oaxaca and there's nothing but heat, dusty roads, and mountains. This book felt like might have starred Grace Kelly in the mid-sixties. Rock Hudson and Burt Lancaster. Rock star cast. Hitchcock directs it. And you sit down on a Friday night with a big bowl of popcorn, ready to get romped.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews