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Sometimes you want to crawl into the pages of a book because it’s like a warm hug (did you just hear Olaf, because that’s definitely what I meant), and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is one of those books.  I want Orchard House to open its arms doors to me and welcome me into it’s familiar, loving embrace.  As much as I adore the 1994 and 2019 movies, they don’t consume me in the way a book does (or the way some other literary houses want to – we’ll come back to that).  Join us to dig into Little Women, definitely the book, maybe the movie(s), and we’ll see what else we get around to in EIGHT DAYS on Friday, December 11 starting at 7:30 p.m. CST for those who sign up here.  

Oh dear readers, I don’t even know where to start, so I’m just jumping right in to it.  I really, really enjoyed Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia!  I didn’t know much about it before reading it.  Anne Bogel was raving about this gothic novel with Jane Eyre vibes, but set in Mexico, and one of my closest friends adored it enough to send me a hardback copy as a surprise!  Ashley and I discussed, put it in November because we were reading from holds and picking what we thought were titles about strong women (it is).  And then…I saw it was classified as horror.  (I recognize this is what I get for saying I don’t read horror back in the fall but I don’t have to like it.)  I stand by what I said on Monday before I finished the book that evening, it feels more paranormal than horror, but also, I get why it’s labeled horror.  AND, if this is horror, please send me a few recommendations along these lines!  

In the past, some books we’ve discussed have a strong sense of place, to the point that the location is just almost a character of its own.  Well, High Place, the home where the vast majority of the action in Mexican Gothic takes place, is 100% a character in this story!  It’s creepy, but (at least to me) in a delightfully appropriate way (meaning I read until 11 p.m. mostly went right to sleep).  Noemí’s dreams did not join me, but oh how I loved them.  It was this delightful mystery I was trying to unscramble from the time she arrived at the house and the lush descriptions of the house and the Doyle family began.  And let me just claim, without spoilers – I had part of it 100% spot on (pun intended)!  I was thinking with too much modern science and not enough alchemy (thank you All Souls Trilogy).  (I’ve also seen this classified as fantasy and I do not approve of that at all.)  

But what is Mexican Gothic actually about though?  Glad you asked!  Noemí is a carefree heiress in 1950s Mexico City, enjoying parties and avoiding marriage.  When her father gets a very unusual letter from her recently married cousin, they bargain for Noemí to be his representative and go visit her cousin to get to the bottom of the matter and ensure she gets the (psychiatric) help she needs.  Noemí goes to the rural mining village and stays with her cousin and her new in-laws in their very old world, European mansion with the eurocentric attitudes and perspectives most of them possess (let’s be real, some have eurocentric attitudes, others are just plain racist).  Noemí quickly learns this is a very different life and family than she’s used to, but she’s a strong, independent woman who’s used to getting her way, so she adapts.  She finds the house, High Place, in quite a dilapidated state and very secluded from the village.  She also learns she’s quite on her own with her mission, which is going to be much more challenging than she originally thought.  “Noemí, you’ll do quite well on your own.”  Wrong book, I know, but I wanted to speak the phrase into her soul so often because, oh readers, she needed it as she kept working towards her goal and finding new wells of strength and determination!  

I want to say more, but also I don’t.  Moreno-Garcia is a talented writer, and she paints a gorgeous picture, unrolling the story slowly with lush descriptions of the house, the scenery, and the characters.  The Doyles are an eccentric family and they are perfectly introduced in the text, so I won’t try here.  As you know I have feelings about endings, I finished and texted Ashley, who had not finished yet, “Dayum!!!!! Needs more EPILOGUE.” To which she replied, “you always say that.”  Yes, yes I do, and that doesn’t make it not true, but it does make it not a spoiler.  While I wanted a few more chapters, I also appreciate where the story leaves us.  We know what went down, and we know what happened to our characters.  Is there room for an epilogue or even a novella?  Yes.  Could there potentially be a sequel?  I can see it, but I don’t think I’d like where it went.  Do I think any of this is remotely realistic?  Absolutely not.  You know what is realistic and already happened?  Moreno-Garcia’s backlist is on my TBR.  Lucky for me, Gods of Jade and Shadow is already on my holds list!  

In closing, I’ve heard some readers complain of this book being slow.  It’s not slow, it’s quiet.  It’s got an intricate story to tell and it takes some time to start weaving the tale because the set up is complex.  But also, let’s get some perspective, it’s only 300 pages!  By the time I hit 200 pages, I was being very careful about when I picked it up because I knew we had only had so many pages until the end and I wanted to savor every. last. bit.  (I was also terrified of hitting a point of not stopping until I finished, like Alix Harrow (author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January – another potential favorite for 2020) gave it five stars on Goodreads after having an inappropriate lack of respect for tomorrow).  If I didn’t already own two copies of this book, I’d be looking to buy one based on that alone!

What book has surprised you in glorious ways?  

~Nikki

I need to make several confessions. I finished reading Mexican Gothic at 11:30pm the day before our post was scheduled to be put out in the world. And now here I am immediately after trying to get some thoughts on paper when I normally take a couple days to percolate my words. It’s a brave new world when I admit that this horror novel is vying for best book of 2020 – and I am regretting that I was unable to change my GoodReads Choice Awards pick in the Horror category to this title from The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires [Nikki here: Cosign, and I was 60% before the Goodreads deadline, so I changed mine to Mexican Gothic because I loved it more.]. My third confession is not a surprise to those who know me, but I am highly allergic to mold and fungi. This is relevant for when we start discussing Mexican Gothic in a little more detail.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a “Mexican by birth and a Canadian by inclination” according to her author bio.  She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. I personally love that she has skipped recognizing the United States of America as a desirable place to live in North America. Her novel from earlier in 2020, Gods of Jade and Shadow, was the 2020 American Library Association Reading List winner in Fantasy AND won the 2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She’s edited multiple anthologies including 2016’s Cthulhu’s Daughters and is the publisher of Innsmouth Free Press. Selfishly I wish she would stop editing other people’s works, writing articles for the Washington Post and book reviews for NPR and just write some more novels, but I feel like that’s terrible as she has multiple books scheduled for publishing in 2021, in addition to the backlist Nikki mentioned above. All of them, I want them all.

I like horror novels. At least I like the two I’ve read this year, but Mexican Gothic had me hooked from the moment Noemí Taboada stepped off the train from Mexico City and into the antique automobile of Francis Doyle and up the mountain to High Place to nurse her cousin back to health. Noemí describes High Place as a once grand manor that has fallen into, if not disrepair, at least neglect. Mildew smells, moldy books, and a fungi covered cemetery are literally the stuff of my nightmares. My breath strains in asthmatic sympathy and my skin prickles with phantom hives – both my reactions to mold and mushrooms. I could not have been the family emissary to my cousin at her husband’s ancestral home if this was what I would have been going into as I would have asphyxiated in my sleep. And then, on top of my allergies to the mold and fungi, it was the 1950’s and the main antibiotic for infections was penicillin – another allergen of mine! Dead. I would have been dead – or at least closer to death than my sick cousin. Adam constantly mentions, every time I have to bring up my mushroom allergy, which is often at restaurants, that all mushrooms are edible, just some only once. My issue is that all mushrooms are the one and done kind for me. 🙁

Regardless of the plethora of deadly allergens for me that are splattered about this book, the prose is so understated that it didn’t feel like I was reading about something inherently disgusting, smelly, and visually unappealing. Moldy, peeling wallpaper is not a Realtor’s ideal situation for a house. But, the love of family and a woman’s ability to ‘get the job done’ is why this book is as of now in my top 10 books of 2020. And also the descriptions of 1950’s fashion. I’m.Here.For.It.All.

What story has made you cringe, possibly gag, or break out into sympathetic hives, and yet sucked you in so that you had no respect for tomorrow?

~Ashley

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