From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Start date: January 15, 2021

Finish date: February 15, 2021

Discussion: Group Reads Discussions

Why we're reading this: January 2021 selection for Minority Authors Theme.
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Group Reads Discussions

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What Members Thought

Aug 23, 2020 Nadine in NY Jones rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy-and-sci-fi, fiction, historical-fiction, horror, paranormal, lotsa-buzz, psych-psych-psych, era-mid-20th-c, r2020-in-2020

This was wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful writing and a classically Gothic plot: Rebecca meets The Yellow Wallpaper. The story was fun: spunky girl goes up against an evil house.

As she moved closer, the hum grew stronger.

It was behind the yellow drape. Noemí raised a hand.

“Don’t,” Catalina said. “You don’t want to see.”

Her fingers touched the drape, and the buzzing became the beating of a thousand frenetic insects against glass, the sound of a swarm caught inside her head, so str

This was wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful writing and a classically Gothic plot: Rebecca meets The Yellow Wallpaper. The story was fun: spunky girl goes up against an evil house.

As she moved closer, the hum grew stronger.

It was behind the yellow drape. Noemí raised a hand.

“Don’t,” Catalina said. “You don’t want to see.”

Her fingers touched the drape, and the buzzing became the beating of a thousand frenetic insects against glass, the sound of a swarm caught inside her head, so strong she could almost feel it like a vibration cutting through the air, and she lifted her head.

Don’t look.

The writing delighted me, I was gripped by the story and couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I was SO gripped by the story that I had to stop reading at one point or I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep that night, because I was so sucked in to the gruesome imagery. But I was also a little disappointed.

I found the foreshadowing was a bit too heavy handed, which eliminated any of the mystery in the plot - I was hit so hard by the foreshadowing that I always knew what was coming, I never had that "gasp!" of surprise moment that I was hoping for. (view spoiler) I was hoping for a more open-ended story, where we were left wondering "did that really happen? or is it all in her head?" so I was a bit deflated when it was all spelled out for us. (view spoiler) The characters all fell too neatly into: good, or evil. There was no in-between, no one evil who felt regrets, no one performing evil tasks with a good heart. Everyone was one or the other.

Noemí is a well-educated and well-read young woman of 1950, fluent in both English and Spanish, so it was odd that she never once mentioned The Yellow Wallpaper (which would have been a 100 year old classic by 1950) or Rebecca (which would have been a recent publication). This wouldn't have bothered me, except for the frequent mentions of other classics, such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, some anthropology texts, and the various fairy tales. (Fairy tales get mentioned A LOT - it started to feel rather repeatey, like a cheap way to give the story a fairy tale feel.) I found it weak to rely so heavily on past texts & stories to set the scene. Same goes for dream sequences: I'm never a fan of dream sequences, and there were quite a few here. ...more

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