THE WITCHES OF EL PASO, a deeply pleasurable read for my Frontera-raised self

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO
LUIS JARAMILLO
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lawyer and her elderly great-aunt use their supernatural gifts to find a lost child in this richly imagined and empowering story of motherhood, magic, and legacy in the vein of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and La Hacienda.

If you call to the witches, they will come.

1943, El Paso, teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

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My Review: So satisfying. Slow and intricate, deep and wise. I'm sure some will find the woven timelines...no definitive breaks or obtrusive tricks mark the shifts in the timeline...to be deal-breakingly imprecise, but to me that made this like an oral performace of a mythic tale. I will say that, as this is also a review of the book meant to instruct others in its merits, I've nicked a half-star off because this pigeonholes the Perfect Reader a bit overly finely.

I don't always love it when men take it upon themselves to write about motherhood. Author Jaramillo manages to do this feat without making the commonest mistakes men fall into: flattening the narrative scope into a litany of caretaking chores or glossing over these same chores. The effect is the same either end of the spectrum. It makes the work of motherhood into insignificant triviality. I hasten to add that many women writers have done the same, Gone Girl being a notable example. In this book, caretaking, mothering, is literally everywhere and yet this didn't obtrude into my consciousness until I was reviewing my notes before writing this review.

That's well-done prosody...I'm in the sounds of the story not in the structure of it. As these are the sounds of la frontera, where I grew up, I fell right in and did not notice it. Very well done indeed, Author Jaramillo.

I don't think any one thing worked more in favor of the book than Nena's manner of explaining the past to her modern, harried granddaughter, not as a place of beautiful memories but of deeds undine and consequences unmet. Business to be finished dominates every life, none moreso than that of the oldest among us. I resonated like a struck bell to this thread of the tapestry woven for me.

As a way to add some occult flavor and Hispanic culture to your #Deathtober reading, this works very well. As a lovely story of the intense bonds of a loving family woman, forced by bitter circumstance to choose actions permanent and irremediable, making amends as best she can, it's gloriously satisfying.

Read soonest.

THE PALACE OF EROS, strange choice of a myth to novelize post-#MeToo

THE PALACE OF EROS
CARO DE ROBERTIS
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ+ SPECULATIVE FICTION.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.

When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.

Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.

Told in bold and sparkling prose, The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.

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My Review: All the Muses please praise the Divine Madeline...Miller, of The Song of Achilles fame...for igniting the seemingly unquenchable flame of queered/regendered mythology retellings we've been treated to this past decade.

The existence of a flood means, obviously and inevitably, some iterations will not live up to the flood-breaker's level. This book is one that doesn't quite reach heights the very best do. Most of that is down to a tendency of the author to, um, overelaborate:

She came here on some winged creature through the night sky, she is a woman free to roam the sky, a woman with a palace, a woman whose days are hidden from you, a woman who can do outrageous things to another woman’s body, a woman whose power is mountainous, whose strength is vast, whose charm is boundless, you’d never imagined such a woman could be, yet here she is, and far be it from you to anger her when she’s already given you so much, how could you ask for more, when she has chosen you for this adventure for some inscrutable reason you’ll never understand, just as it’s impossible to understand how this adventure can exist or what the scope of it will be, but there it is, the need to clasp it close and not let go because you want this life she’s offered you, want it with every fiber of your being, yet also want to hold on to your own knowing, however tiny it may be compared to hers.

I think that single sentence says more than I ever could.

I am very sure that, absent familiarity with the many versions existing of the underlying myth, this story will still make sense. After you take out you mental machete and whack back some of the vines and shrubs in your path. It is not, in the final analysis, a terribly complicated plot. It's about the nature of desire, and to twenty-first century eyes, the nature of consent.

I was most interested in Author De Robertis' decision to use first-person narration, and a deep access to her thoughts and feelings, for the human/victim of coercive sex Psyche, while according the deity/rapist third person freedom. A force of nature like a deity should, I agree, have an impersonal voice; if any personification of a natural force needs and deserves this distancing, it is the personification of Lust, and subsidiarily, physical Love. There is a reason the Greeks split Love/Aphrodite from Lust/sex Eros. These things are not the same.

I don't entirely understand why, post-#MeToo, one would choose to retell this particular myth without including some examination of the romanticization of coercion that the myth has always represented. Making Eros a non-binary deity, while very much in the spirit of the times, doesn't change what Eros did to Psyche.

A slender reed of a story to hang a novel on, and one that still misses its chances to add value to the ongoing conversation about sexuality and romance. Published about ten years too late to make its best and biggest splash.