MUÑECA, sapphic gothic tale in 1960s Oakland

MUÑECA
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts—ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

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My Review: Oakland, California, gets very little love in the literary world. From Gertrude Stein's famous "there is no there there" quip to this very day, Oakland is mostly just the place that's across the bay from San Francisco. This novella/short novel (under 200pp) is set there in 1968, a fraught time before Stonewall ignited the gay-rights movement but after the Black Panther Party was founded there. Oakland was bubbling and seething with the energy of change that so spectacularly fizzled out in the malaise of the 1970s.

Nati is the perfect PoV for a supernatural suspense novel set in 1968 Oakland: she's a closeted lesbian with a hidden extraordinary ability, heir to a line of women who work outside the norms of their society...their white society, the Overculture whose very definition creates or at least delineates repressive, controlling, often authoritarian conformity. Nati does not live within the Overculture's rules though she largely disappears into its strictures by hiding in plain sight. She takes her revenge on those who keep her down because she's a brown-skinned woman by nibbling at the edges, by not accepting what she must obey, by taking a bit here and there. Her chance to exact serious revenge on her late mother's former employers is her cue to grab more for herself.

Only that more proves to be the love and the essence of the family, Violeta. A trapped woman subject to a greedy man's whims, an heiress and a pawn, Violeta is the path for Nati's revenge to manifest itself in the world. Gothic hero stuff ensues as Violeta is the gothic heroine all helpless and needing rescue from a lingering death. Nati does everything she can to break Violeta out of her helplessness, using her not-ordinary familial talents and learning in a 1968 that dismisses suchlike goins-on.

The novellaness of the story shows to disadvantage here. In the rush to resolve Violeta's disability, Nati is kept very busy indeed. She's actively working her magic, she's taking responsibilities in Violeta's life, she's even willing to do the dark work of self-healing. It means I felt knackered by the end of the read, there was so much happening in a tight window of time.

It's a four-star read because I was too tired to press the button for a fifth star. I was delighted by Nati, by her craft and her craftiness. I really wanted to spend more time with her, maybe just hang out while learning about her childhood in and around the Miramontes clan when her mama worked for them, learning about her earlier life with the class divide rigidly in place.

Still and finally a solidly fun sapphic gothic tale of revenge and vengeance and avenging wrongs all happening at once.

SALT BONES, Demeter & Persephone on the Mexicali border

SALT BONES
JENNIFER GIVHAN
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life. She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

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My Review: There's Spanish in here.

Everybody still here, this is a retelling of Demeter and Persephone, probably the original mother-myth in Western culture. It is also notable that Demeter's the oldest sister of baby Zeus...that energy surrounding maleness surrounds this entire story.

Are the whiny man-babys gone yet? Good.

The gynergy is strong in this one, folks. All the horror, and there's a lot of it, stems from problems and issues around femaleness in our highly misogynistic culture. Women are, for a wonder, presented as misogynistic as hell in here, and all the monstrous, horrifying behavior is portrayed as affecting women. (Why the fathers aren't ever fussed I'll leave to your imagination.)

Invest in the first quarter to third of the read as your acclimatization, get used to Mal and her pueblo's speech patterns, and (ebook users only) try out the built-in translation feature to get the hang of Spanglish, then cruise through the story that fills in the lines of the old myth in a really fun...not the right word, but "interesting" is so juiceless and "involving so cerebral...unexpected way.

It's a dark reality that Mal's fears and worries are rooted in the ugliness that is femicide, a too-easily-dismissed issue plaguing la frontera. Stories like this one are ways to increase awareness of the precarity of simply existing as a female, or in a female body, in so many parts of the world. And like the real world, some people have privilege, even when bad things happen to and around them. Seeing the author present this as a reality, well...brava for doing it at all, and do it more, please.

The Salton Sea is important enough to the read that I recommend you acquire basic knowledge of it, its existence and origin, before embarking on this fascinating thriller. I found the pace fast. I don't think everyone will. I hope you'll try, though.

LOCA, debut found-family novel of New York's Dominican diaspora

LOCA
ALEJANDRO HEREDIA
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Lambda Literary Award–winning author Alejandro Heredia comes a spellbinding debut about intersectionality, enduring friendship, and found family set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, following two Afro-Caribbean friends as they journey beyond the confined expectations of their home country in the Dominican Republic and begin new lives in New York City.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

With both friends feeling the same pressures in New York that forced them from their homes, a chance outing at a gay bar introduces Sal to Vance, an African American gay man whose romantic relationship with Sal challenges him to confront the trauma of his past. Through Vance, Charo befriends Ella, an African American trans woman, and Ella’s refusal to be who or what society dictates she should be inspires Charo to reckon with the role she’s grown comfortable in. Sal and Charo soon find themselves part of a queer intersectional community who disrupt the status quo of gender politics and conformity, allowing both to create the family and identities they’ve always longed for.

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My Review: "No matter where you go, there you are" meets "The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." Socrates and Buckaroo Banzai in one sentence has to be a new record of weirdness even for me. When I read a book with Spanish and English side by side, I'm inspired to make connections. In my daily life I'm surrounded by Spanish-speaking folk, I grew up a denizen of La Frontera, I was taught Spanish in school...read my first foreign-language novel in junior high Spanish class...I am, in short, at home.

That is how this novel felt to me, like a homecoming. I'm upset that many of y'all will avoid the read like it gots the cooties *because* there's another language in it. Some because there's transgender representation. Some because it doesn't center, or to the best of my recollection contain, any wypipo. (Look it up.) Adding to the reasons I liked the read, and others won't, is New York City. That great cultural lightning rod with its century-old antisemitic epithet, its much-maligned by flyover country denizens Harlemness, that haven and home for Others. How that's a bad thing, honestly, is beyond my scope of imagination. I see it like Sal and Charo do, a place not to be defined by others but a place to do one's own defining. How can that be bad?

Sal, who provides the bulk of the narrative, is coming of age in a place as little unlike his home as he can bear. The Latine diaspora in New York City has enough cultural similarity and still enough cover to hide from the ugliness of his past. He's been traumatized, as a queer boy I don't imagine I need to spell it out for you, and feels safer in New York. After all, it's harder to hate people when you don't know them, right? Disappearing into a crowd is safety?

Hmmm. Us oldsters are pretty sure that's fallacious already on first hearing but young people need to learn the hard way. Which explains in part why there are fewer old people than young ones.

1990s New York is the one I remember best. Things were changing and that's utterly ensorcelling to young people seeking personal change. The problem comes when the young person ignores the fact that change isn't a function of location, as Peter Weller memorably says in the clip linked above. Socrates (allegedly; at this distance in time, who really knows who formulated the thought?) elucidates the other issue Sal confronts in his desperate bid to change by escaping what he was told he was. It isn't until he meets a role model for his queerness who, like him, is a Black man but is also from the US, that he begins to *build* an identity not run from a label slapped on him.

Charo might have the harder task. She does NOT want to be a punching bag for some man, in sexual slavery to him and a breeding machine for babies. Guess what. Moving to New York City on the cusp of a new century, a new millennium, doesn't change her less-obvious struggle any more than it does Sal's. Luckily for her, this is a soulbrother she's found, this is a connection they won't break. Sal is a role model for moving forward into being, into crafting, a new self. I expect these kids did just fine for themselves, and that is a great feeling to end a read on.

So why not more stars? Because, even though I get that the chaotic timeline with flashbacks and PoV changes is very much the way we live our lives in reality—complete with intrusive ruminations—fiction needs more order than life to work as a story. This book was, from the get-go, going to be more than one story with more than one main character. What happened was what so often does: One of the characters has more to say to the author than the other. It comes down to page-time. Sal's is the dominant PoV but we're more acquainted with him than really close friends, as a single PoV novel allows us to feel.

The truth is that's not a flaw when it's by design as it is here...we're apparently meant to feel we're conversationally getting to know a person's history and life events...but that carries an inherent issue of diminished investment in that PoV. When we don't focus hard on something, due to different kinds of interruptions in narrative flow, we don't necessarily get the same level of reward for our attention.

It's a braided-stories novel, a set of vignettes with beginnings and middles, whose ends we mostly know from their being flashbacks. It's a valid storytelling technique simply not one I love with the kind of passion I had to invest in this very involving set-up taking place in a world I knew, and remember fondly. So three and three-quarters of a star subjectively awarded.

Objectively I laud this debut novel by an author with a resonant voice, and encourage you to encourage him and his publisher by reading his book.

HOW WE NAMED THE STARS, sweet first novel about first love

HOW WE NAMED THE STARS
ANDRÉS ORDORICA
Tin House
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Set between the United States and México, Andrés N. Ordorica’s debut novel is a tender and lyrical exploration of belonging, grief, and first love―a love story for those so often written off the page.

When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first―but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light.

But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new

How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? How is his own story connected to his late uncle’s? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward? Equal parts tender and triumphant, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars is a debut novel of love, heartache, redemption, and learning to honor the dead; a story of finding the strength to figure out who you are―and who you could be―if only the world would let you.

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My Review: Books about first love are, I think we can all agree, among the most relatable stories there are. Everyone not a sociopath has had a First Love. We can all recall the feelings, the sensations, the sheer exhilaration of falling in love for the first time, and I suspect most of us not sociopaths also recall the returned love from the one we just fell in love with, even if not the first time. So, when choosing a story to tell, a debut novelist really starts out on a higher slope if they choose first...and for added charm forbidden...love.

What a shame I was not utterly ensorcelled by this iteration of the story.

I suspect some of this is due to the author's use of the character's journal as a narrative frame. This necessitates alternating first- and second-person narratives, sometimes in the same sentence; I assume this was an attempt to create a sense of immediacy unavailable in third-person omniscient narration. What happened instead was a sense of muddledness, a lack of clear character-building through different, or just differentiated, voices. The result was that I felt like this was an audiobook. Someone reading to me, unless I am in love with him, makes me utterly fuddled, and sends me into a defensive coma. It took me two weeks to read this not-very-long book.

My last critical comments are about the use of description: I am a lot less interested in rocks than the author appears to be. Is the color green talismanic for some reason? Why? If I am not given a hook to hang my response on, all it does, when a motif is repeated like the use of green is here, is start feeling like I am missing something. That is never a good thing.

So, for the sin of writing a first novel without some very firm editorial guidance, I docked stars. But that said, there are things I loved about this tale. I was particularly pleased that Spanish appeared throughout the read. The chapter titles being in Spanish when Daniel is in Mexico was a lovely touch, and offered me a distinctively culture-specific frame for those chapters. Daniel feeling his way through the bewildering maze of the US culture, through the school's culture, and through his forbidden love for another man, was absolutely terrific. It was, at times, unfocused due to the issues I mentioned above, but never so much so that I was unaware that Daniel...and Sam...were enmeshed in their emotional growth into love. Self-love, as always, has to precede lasting love for others. That is the universal agony of first gay loves, I fear.

Speaking of which...Sam being seen in all his waffling glory only through Daniel's eyes was, at first, odd...back the narrative framework issue...but ended up feeling so exactly like the first-love malaise that I quickly began to warm to it. First love is, of necessity, solipsistic. We can never really get out of that self-referential stage of being in love with love until, and unless, we go all the way through it. Daniel going home to stay with his abuelo and delve into his namesake uncle's life and times was a really suitable way to guide him through the thicket of his self-absorption. His emotional flowering struck me as both truthful and effective...I believed it, and I believed he was changed in the ways shown, by the discoveries he made.

While I am on the subject, I feel the necessity to address a critique of the author's handling of societal homophobia that I have seen brought up several times. It can seem as though the inevitable experience of others’ hateful judgments of himself and of Sam were lightly brushed off. I did not read them this way. As the novel is framed as a journal, the lack of sustained responses to and obsessions with homopohbia struck me as Daniel having, developing, and imparting to the more-affected Sam, a sense of homophobia being an external not internal problem...something imposed from outside. That is exactly how I think homophobia *should* be perceived. It is only a problem for one when one is interacting with the homohobes. That is a major positive in my opinion of the read because it shows the need to decenter the hate.

A mixed reading experience, one with major positives and a bunch of small negatives. A first novel, I hope not an only novel, from a man whose emotional journey is, quite clearly, only beginning, and which I am glad I can share.

SKELETITOS: Make Every Moment Count, perfect for the littlest reader who longs for Halloween all year

SKELETITOS: Make Every Moment Count
SUSIE JARAMILLO
Encantos Media Studios
$12.99 board book, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Come enter the spooky-kooky, creepy-crawly, mysterious, and mischievous world of Skeletitos, where being on the other side of life is never an excuse for not having a good time!

Let the hands-on our clock set the pace for an hourly celebration of the ordinary and extraordinary. Tap your fingers or stomp your feet, no need to sit still. After all, before you know it, our time will be up!

Hard cover, lift-the-flap board book 6 x 6"

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My Review: A completely adorable board book for the youngest readers. The artwork is charming in the extreme:

...the message of not waiting for life to be perfect to enjoy every minute of it is perfect for little lap readers to take on board with the whimsical art and the cute little story about the skeletitos enjoying Día de los Muertos, so much a part of Hispanic culture...becoming more and more part of US Halloween season festivities!

The counting practice is the other point of appeal to parents. There is also the added appeal of talking to kids about analog time-telling, a skill it grows ever harder to help them acquire. Any little one who loves the fun and cosplay of Halloween is the right reader, or to be read to, for this delightful book.