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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

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.

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

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.