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The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

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Cover of The Hacienda by Isabel Ceñas against a white backdrop with a red rose next to it.

I mentioned in an earlier review how much I love Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  Her book, Mexican Gothic, is fantastic and really won me over to gothic novels.  So when I glimpsed The Hacienda on the shelf, I immediately gravitated towards it. 

Set in Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence (which ended in 1821), The Hacienda follows a young woman named Beatriz.  Beatriz’s father, a respected general, ended up on the losing side of the war.  As a result, Beatriz and her mother lost their home, their status, and everything they.  In dire financial straits, Beatriz is determined to do whatever it takes to get her mother and herself out of this situation. 

A solution appears in the form of Rodolfo, a wealthy man about whom Beatriz knows very little.  Still, he owns a hacienda, he has good social standing, and he’s enchanted by Beatriz.  Despite her mother’s protests, Beatriz marries him and heads out to the hacienda. 

Beatriz has everything planned out: establish herself as the mistress of the hacienda, make the house a home, and then bring her mother to join her.  But the household – and the house – have other plans.  From the moment she steps through the door, Beatriz gets an ominous feeling.  Rodolfo’s sister seems suspicious, and the kitchen help are constantly burning incense and scratching symbols in the doorways.  Then there’s the mystery of what happened to Rodolfo’s first wife and whether history may be repeating.

While all of this is going on, we meet Padre Andrés, a young Indigenous Catholic priest with deep connections to the hacienda and his own haunted past.  As forces outside their control conspire against them, the priest and the new bride are drawn together. 

This is a fast moving story and even when you have a good guess of what’s going to happen, you still want to keep reading to see how it plays out.  There’s romance, of course – what kind of gothic novel wouldn’t have one? It’s a well-built romance, and one that stays true to the characters and their situations.

Cañas also does a wonderful job of situating readers in the historical landscape of revolutionary Mexico.  Without becoming an academic paper, Cañas interrogates the impact of race and colonialism in Mexican society. It’s a complex topic, and yet it weaves in seamlessly with the story of a haunted house. 

Part of the reason Beatriz jumps at the chance to marry a man like Rodolfo is her awareness that her father’s disgraced reputation in this new order and her darker skin tone significantly limit her marriage prospects.  Meanwhile, Padre Andrés also grapples with his ethnic heritage, the spiritual practices he learned from his grandmother, and the faith instilled in him by the Catholic Church.  The blending of Catholicism and Indigenous beliefs also rang true and was a welcomed addition to the story. 

Most importantly, The Hacienda is a fun, engaging, and enthralling story.  We get to jump between perspectives of Beatriz and Andrés, with a little bit of back and forth through time. Cañas handles both deftly.  There was never a feeling of “ugh, did we have to switch characters” or anything like that.  Instead, the two side complimented each other well and added to the depth of the story. 

The Hacienda is Cañas’ debut novel and if this is her first, I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next!

Find it here

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffery

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Cover of The Mermaid of Black Conch against a backdrop of water.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of authors taking old myths or mythological creatures and putting a new spin on them.  The Mermaid of Black Conch is a great addition to that genre.  Instead of The Little Mermaid type tale about a mermaid who wants to become human, the mermaid of Black Conch used to be human and a curse transformed her into a mermaid. After living as a mermaid for centuries, she suddenly and violently finds herself returning to land. 

The story follows several characters, but primarily we have David, a young man born and raised in Trinidad who spends most of his days out fishing.  He brings his guitar and sings and plays while out on his boat.  His music catches the attention of a mermaid named Aycayia, who breaks the surface to hear him better, stunning David and encouraging him to return to the spot and sing day after day. 

Aycayia was a Taino woman, living before Columbus showed up and shattered the world.  Her beauty and voice drew men to her, to the annoyance of the other women of the island. They cursed her and another older woman who was Aycayia’s friend. Aycayia became a mermaid, the other woman a sea turtle, and they spent the centuries in the sea, avoiding humans.  Until David’s singing reached Aycayia’s ears in 1975.  Though Aycayia doesn’t speak to him, she begins to follow his boat, listening to his music and remembering her old life. 

Then a couple White Americans invade their tranquility. The father, a businessman – a “man’s man” – is determined to use a big game fishing trip to toughen up his perceived weakling of a son.  His son, not exactly thrilled to be on this trip, casts his line. Unbeknownst to him, Aycayia heard the motor and, assuming it was David, swam into the area. The bite on his line was no big game fish. Together, father and son reel in the biggest catch ever – an actual mermaid.

After they bring her in and string her up on the dock like the giddy fishermen in Jaws who imagine themselves to be kings of the ocean, they go celebrate at the bar. David, wracked with guilt, takes the opportunity to cut Aycayia loose and bring her back to his home. While she recovers in his bathtub, David tries to figure out what he should do next. Slowly, Aycayia’s curse seems to lift, creating new dilemmas for everyone.

Told primarily through a third person narrative, Roffey peppers in excerpts from David’s journal and Aycayia’s viewpoint as well. It’s an elegant use of language. Even though everything is in English, Roffey deftly uses distinctive voices for each of the characters. Aycayia’s use of verse is particularly well done.

The Mermaid of Black Conch is more than a revision of classic mermaid tales. It also tackles colonialism, racism, love, jealously, class, and more.  All of it is wrapped up into an intriguing and compelling story spanning centuries.   

Find it here

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

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The World We Make book in front of an iron statute of a female figure carrying a book.
Photo taken at the Cleveland Public Library

First things first: The World We Make is a sequel to The City We Became.  Highly, highly recommend you go read that if you haven’t yet.  In both books, Jemisin tackles the very real and present issues of gentrification, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, etc., but with a sci-fi/fantasy twist.  I’ll give a brief review of The City We Became, which I read a few years ago when it came out. Then I’ll jump into The World We Make.

Mini-Review: The City We Became

The City We Became book against a hazy gold background and a shadow of some kind of tentacled monster.
I took this photo ages ago and I’m not sure I could ever pull it off again.

Jemisin is the kind of author who will throw you right into the deep end. You may spend time flailing to get to the surface, but once you learn to swim, you never want to get out of the water. In this book, we learn that cities become living things, represented by human avatars. New York City is undergoing this process, but something’s different this time. Each of the boroughs must come together to protect the city.  A different person represents each borough and each has a connection to their part of the city. 

As a result, the chapters jump between the various characters’ perspectives. Manny, Manhattan’s avatar, who has lost most of his memories.  Brooklyn, who fittingly represents Brooklyn. She’s a former rapper and now a councilwoman, fighting to save her family’s brownstone. Bronca, an artist, represents the Bronx.  Pamini, a mathematician on a student visa, embodies Queens.  And from Staten Island, Aislyn.  Aside from Aislyn, all the avatars are people of color, and many are queer.  In addition to the avatars of the boroughs, there’s a primary avatar, who is missing. 

Then there is the Enemy, a force committed to city infanticide. The avatars are the only ones who can see this Enemy, but civilians are unknowingly impacted by its actions.  Despite being strangers to one another, the avatars must find each other and beat back the enemy. 

Jemisin does a great job using Manny’s amnesia to stand in for our complete loss as to what’s going on without being heavy handed about it.  Each character has such a different personality and background, yet they all feel like complete people right off the bat.  Jemisin is a master at writing stories from different perspectives.  Each time I start with one character, I don’t want their chapter to end, but by the time I start the next one’s, I’m now committed to them.  It takes a lot of skill to pull that off and Jemisin makes it look easy.    

I’ve only been to NYC once, and it was a brief trip.  I only visited Manhattan and Brooklyn, but I would love to go back for a more in-depth visit someday.  Jemisin write a fantastic love letter to the city and its people.  She doesn’t hide from the city’s struggle, but she dwells in the glory of all of its people, all their diversity, their myriad backgrounds, and their overarching identity as New Yorkers.

Ok, now on to The World We Make.

Cover of The World We Make on a stone wall with a few buildings visible through the fog.
Just a fun note, I delayed posting this review because I wanted to take the book to work with me and get some shots of it against the backdrop of downtown Cleveland (I know, definitely not New York, but this blog doesn’t make money so no travel budget). And then of course the day I went was the day it was completely covered in fog. There’s supposed to be a skyline back there.

There’s a lot I want to talk about, but I’m not sure what would count as a spoiler.  So I’m creating a World We Make spoilers page and I’ll go into some of the things there.  If you want to go into the book mostly blind, then just stay here.  But if you’ve read it or don’t mind learning more details ahead of time, check it out!

While it should probably go without saying, from here on out, there will be spoilers for The City We Became, so if you haven’t read that one yet, beware!

The book picks up pretty much right where we left everyone after The City We Became.  The borough avatars (minus traitor Staten Island, but picking up sixth borough Jersey City) along with the primary New York City avatar (going by the name Nyc, pronounced Neek) are adjusting to life as the living embodiments of a city.  While they have unique powers, they also still live their regular life.  And over all that looms the Enemy’s stronghold, hovering over Staten Island.  The Woman in White might not be able to directly enter the NYC, but the avatars (and the city) are not safe by any means. 

There are personal challenges – Brooklyn needs to save her family’s brownstone home from a tricky gentrification grab.  Manny is slowly figuring out his past, as well as struggling to figure out whether he can make a future with Nyc.  Pamini has work and visa issues, and so on and so forth.  But the bigger existential crisis is the Woman in White and the rest of the world’s avatars seeming unwillingness to address the problem. 

In this book, we branch out a bit and meet some other cities, including Tokyo and Istanbul.  We see a dead and lifeless city, a victim of the Enemy.  And we spend some more time with Aislyn and see how her deal with the devil is working. 

Current events drive the narrative of this book. (Though it should be noted that reality stole from Jemisin, as she was writing this first.)  A new mayoral candidate has appeared, claiming he will make New York great again and bring it back to “real” New Yorkers. But of course, the  so-called “real New York” he claims to represent is simply a figment of a hateful imagination.  It would be comforting to think this is simply the Woman in White’s doing but, as we know all too well, this kind of hate can thrive on its own without outside assistance. 

Overall, I thought this was very well done and I really enjoyed jumping back into this world. I appreciated the insight into why the Enemy did what it did and where it came from.  I also thought Jemisin did a great job of giving us an understanding of Aislyn without excusing or condoning her. 

Unfortunately, I felt like some of the characters got short shrift in this one.  We almost never heard from Bronca, for instance.  Overall, I felt like there was more emphasis on events rather than characters this time around, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just different.  I missed feeling as connected with everyone this time around though.  I also felt the conclusion was a bit rushed, but as I’ll discuss in the spoiler section, additional knowledge clarified why. 

All that said, this was a powerful follow-up to a fantastic concept started in the first book.  And now that both are out, you can enjoy reading them back-to-back.  And if you haven’t read any of N.K. Jemisin’s other books, I strongly recommend them all. 

Find it here

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

/ Denise / 5 Comments
Cover of The Sentence by Louise Erdirch against a bookcase.

November is Native American Heritage month, so it’s a great time to check out the plethora of amazing Indigenous authors.  I’ve written reviews on some already, and I’ll be doing more later. (There’s absolutely zero reason to limit it to a particular month!)  If you’re looking to support Native-owned businesses and get some great books by Native authors, check out Birchbark Books.  It’s an independent bookstore whose owner is Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians. She is also the author of today’s feature, The Sentence. 

The Sentence is, in a sense, a ghost story. A dead customer haunts a small Minneapolis bookstore. Not just any customer, of course, but the most annoying one. Because of course that’s the kind of customer who would come back and haunt a place. Flora was a white woman who desperately wanted to be Indigenous. Tookie, a thirty-something Native American employee, tries to find out how to help Flora find peace and move on. She soon learns that Flora died while reading a particular sentence in a book. When Tookie tries to read the book herself, eerie things begin to happen to her.

Yet the ghost of a frustrating customer isn’t the only silenced voice demanding to be heard. The story begins in November 2019.  Within months, the world fractures with the outbreak of Covid-19 and the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd. The ghosts of our history soon fill the homes in which people sequester and then flood the streets along with the protestors, police, and tear gas. Tragedies big and small, intimate and emblazoned on screens around the world can only be ignored at our own peril. 

I cannot praise this book highly enough.  The writing is just so damn good.  (A common feature of Erdrich’s books.) The Sentence contains commentary on race and justice (and injustice), family, history, and more, but throughout it all is the power of words. The way Tookie constantly searches for just the right word at any given moment, and Erdrich’s way of breaking them down – well, I have to let them speak for themselves. The book opens:

While in prison, I received a dictionary.  It was sent to me with a note.  This is the book I would take to a deserted island. Other books were to arrive from my teacher.  But as she had known, this one proved of endless use.  The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife.  So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day.  Without a doubt, had the dictionary not arrived, this light word that lay so heavily upon me would have crushed me, or what was left of me after the strangeness of what I’d done.

It’s the kind of writing that sends a thrill. It makes you wish you could somehow harness even a smidgen of this skill.

Setting the book in a version of her own store, The Sentence is heaven for book lovers. There are so many titles referenced, and a bibliography at the end, my to-be-read list grew another three feet. I also appreciated the feedback on how not to be that kind of customer. You know, this kind:

            ‘I could have bought in on Amazon, but I said to myself – although I live miles away, other side of St. Paul – I said to myself that I really should support the little independent bookstores. So I drove all the way here and you know it took me an hour because I-94 is down to one lane again?’

There’s a lot of little lessons on how not to be a well-meaning but cringy white liberal, something we as a group often need. 

But on a more serious note, it’s still odd to read about the early days of the pandemic and the protests. Obviously, I lived through them. Some of the scenes mirrored my own experiences – searching frantically for something I could use as a mask because we needed groceries and didn’t have delivery options set up yet, trying to figure out whether I really needed to wipe down said groceries, the sudden shrinking of the world to the walls of my home.

And then the video. The calls for mama. The increasingly desperate pleas of bystanders to stop, as George Floyd’s killer triumphantly corrupted one Black man’s symbol of protest against police brutality to take the life of another Black man. The protests. The burning of the precinct. The helicopters and the curfews and the National Guard. The weighing of the importance of being part of the protests vs. the risk of a deadly virus that thrives in close contact.

As a Minnesota native who left the state years ago, I appreciated having a first-hand account of living through it. If you’ll forgive the personal digression, it brought me back to an example of how our education shapes us, and the importance of having a variety of voices.  I remember clearly being in first grade, learning about the Civil War and being proud that my state was on the right side of that historic crucible, as though I was personally responsible for that choice.

As I got older, I learned a more complex side of that history – that during that same period, Minnesota’s treatment of the Dakota led to the largest mass execution in U.S. history. In college, I saw a photo of a lynching that occurred in Duluth during the 1920s. Throughout elementary school, I learned about the Rondo neighborhood, a Black middle-class neighborhood destroyed in the 1950s to make room for the interstate (I-94). 

More and more, I learned that while Minnesota was a great place to live and raise a family for white folks, it was a completely different story for Blacks, American Indians, Hmong, Somalis, and others. Some people might complain that this is critical race theory.  On the contrary, it’s vital to remember that there’s no simple “good vs. bad.” One can admire the ideals a state or country might have, but it’s imperative to also recognize its flaws. Life is complicated; history is complicated.  Good and bad can co-exist in an identity and it is our job to recognize both and everything in between. The ghosts of our history can guide us, not haunt us.

If we listen to them.

Once The Sentence reaches May 2020, sections are labeled by day: May 25, May 30, May 31.  And then May 32, May 34.  It’s an encapsulation of how that monumental month stretched past our usual boundaries. Life couldn’t simply keep going on as it always had. It didn’t stop, but it was not the same.

Some things in life are just that powerful.  A disease. A video. A murder.

A sentence. 

Find it here.

Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston

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Book cover of Master of Poisons with a tiger lily flower on the right.

I love entering new fantasy worlds.  As terrible as I am with learning new languages, I enjoy puzzling out a society’s hierarchy, the slang, the idioms, the power structures, religious/spiritual beliefs, etc. Andrea Hairston creates a fantastic world to puzzle through. I’ve written previously that I’m also a big fan of fantasy based on something other than medieval Europe, and Master of Poisons, with its African foundation, checks that box too. 

“We are more likely to deny truth than admit grave error and change our minds.  Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of imminent destruction, we refuse to believe in any gods but our own.  Who can bear for the ground to dissolve under their feet and the stars to fall from the sky?  So we twist every story to preserve our faith.”

Djola is the Master of Poisons for the Arkhysian Empire and the right-hand man of Emperor Azizi.  He has spent the last twenty years trying to convince the Emperor and the rest of his council that if the empire didn’t start caring for the environment and make the necessary, but difficult, changes, the consequences would be dire.  Slowly at first, and then more quickly, poison deserts expanded, destroying forests and rivers and displacing people.  But:

“As long as sweet water fell from the sky every afternoon and mist rolled in on a night win, everybody promised to change – tomorrow or next week.  Then crops failed and rivers turned to dust.  Good citizens now feared change would make no difference or was in fact impossible.  Who could fight the wind?”

The allegory for our current climate crisis is clear.  Djola’s frustration is one shared by anyone who paid attention to scientists since the 70s regarding greenhouse gasses.  No one wants to make the necessary changes, which might require some short-term pain or disruptions, to prevent disaster 50-100 years down the road.  But once they start living with the actual effects of their inaction, they become paralyzed, thinking that there is no way to change their trajectory and they are doomed.  They still don’t seem to understand that even if they can’t go back to a better time, they can at least work to prevent things from getting worse.  Instead, they’ll listen to short-term cons that might provide an illusion of improvement, but create even more long-term crises.  Djola finds himself exiled, searching for magic that might finally solve the problem.

Meanwhile, a young girl named Awa already has a significant connection to alternate spirit realms.  With an affinity for bees, Awa can make journeys into Smokeland, which creates dangers for her.  Sold off by her father at age 12, Awa is all too aware of society’s views of women, non-binary folks, and non-male magic users.  Thankfully, she was sold to a group of griots (storytellers), who help her develop her skills. 

Overall, Master of Poisons is a fascinating world.  Or worlds, when you consider the Smokelands.  I also really appreciated that these characters aren’t solving the problem overnight.  Years can pass between chapters or segments of the book and characters still aren’t even sure where to start.  In addition to the climate issue, Master of Poisons also tackles issues of race, gender, empire, and family.

In a lot of ways, though, this was a book that I felt more like I wanted to like rather than one I actually did like.  There were a lot of things that still seemed a little unclear or that I didn’t quite gel with.  It’s possible that part of that reason is that the climate situation is too close to reality and knowing that there isn’t a magic spell that could turn things around is disheartening. And yet, the point of the story is that even in a world of magic, fixing systemic problems requires a lot of work, dedication, and cooperation between diverse groups. 

I felt like this was a stand-alone book, which I appreciate it. Series are wonderful, but sometimes I just want a complete story in one book.  Master of Poisons is the type of book will probably benefit from multiple re-reads.  So while it wasn’t my favorite, I’m glad I read it and maybe at some point, I’ll be back to visit it again. 

Find it online here.