Two books in February
As predicted, my churn of new book completions has dramatically slowed in February compared with January, now that I am back to work and to my regularly scheduled life. I have, nonetheless, completed two more new-to-me novels after the month opener, Offshore (reviewed here) and am close to finished a non-fiction book (which will be reviewed soon, it is giving me much food for thought).
This was an enjoyable story, with many moments of what felt like genuine insight and pathos, somewhat weakened by its very predictable rom-com beats and further flawed by a too-neat ending.
Phoebe, the main character, was an appealing person who I could engage with, and I thought most of the secondary characters were surprisingly vivid and well-drawn. I especially liked Marla, the caustic sister-in-law to be; Juice, the groom's 12 year old daughter; Jim, the best man; and above all, Lila, the spoilt, often bratty, but compellingly attractive (and I don't mean just beautiful, I mean as a personality) bride.
I liked the device of having Phoebe, as the outsider who has come to the beautiful inn to kill herself following the failure of IVF, the breakdown of her marriage, and deep depression, become the person that all the characters present at the inn for the fancy wedding week celebrations confide in. That actually rang true for me - I have been in Phoebe's shoes time and again myself, in hotels, on airplanes, in tea shops and libraries and parks. It is easier in many ways for people to open up to a stranger who has the right emotional affect, precisely because they owe nothing to you and can walk away at the end of the interaction.
I also liked the way the friendship between Phoebe and Lila grew, despite its profound unlikeliness. I thought it was really effectively done, and felt honest to both of their emotional situations. While there was tenderness in it, there was also honesty and acidity, which saved it from being saccharine.
However, there was one central romantic plot in the book I didn't really like (it would be a spoiler to name it more explicitly, so I won't), and one twist near the end that I genuinely hated and thought read like wish-fulfilment fanfiction rather than a real book device. Those two things, plus the overly neat tie-up-in-a-bow ending, took it down for me from "great" to "good". I'd still recommend it for fans of contemporary fiction with a rom-com bent, though! 7/10 for me.
The plot is basically a three-timelines supernatural fantasy horror / thriller, built around a particular conceptual framing of "bewitching" that owes its origins to both Mexican and New England folklore. In the turn of the century plot, the focus is on Alba, a young woman whose Mexican rural landowning family is afflicted with a bewitchment. In the 1930s, the focus is on the disappearance of Virginia Somerset, a college student who believed she had been bewitched, and the lifelong impact her disappearance had on her friend Beatrice Tremblay (who went on to be a horror writer). In the 1990s, our putative protagonist, Minerva (the great-granddaughter of Alba from Plot A), a graduate student at the same college that Virginia and Beatrice attended, becomes the focus.
As a set-up, it's fine, and I thought the creepiness of the bewitching process was well carried - the sense of an enclosing doom was (appropriately) suffocating and often genuinely frightening. The book is well-written and quite evocative, with descriptions that manage to be both rich and not overcooked.
However, the pacing in the book was off, to such an extent that I kept losing attention with it and wandering off to read something else (it took me almost a month to get through it, which is an unheard-of amount of time for a fantasy horror for me). I think it was because Moreno-Garcia kind of screwed the pooch with the three-timelines device (which is, in fairness, a tricky thing to pull off). Just as narrative tension started to build in Plot A, we were whisked away to a boring description of a college dorm in Plot C, then whiplashed into some unexplicated social commentary about the 1930s in Plot B.
Moreover, I did not find all three plots equally compelling. Alba's plot (A) was great, but Minerva's contemporary plot and Virginia's 1930s plot were both kind of dull. Additionally, the reveals were such utter non-surprises that they almost annoyed me when they came (I had identified the witch in all three timelines before the relevant characters even walked into the page, just from context clues - if it they were meant to be gasp moments, they landed very flat).
Overall, I would say I respect the attempt and I found the witch lore pretty interesting, but as a book, this one ended up as just a midband read for me. 6/10, most of which is for Alba's plot and for Moreno-Garcia's writing style.
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