PositiveTor.comIt was difficult for me to enter the book wholeheartedly at first...I liked that, as a young Mexican woman, Noemi is represented as scholarly, curious and also tenacious and interested in living her life freely, but at times, she also serves as a repository of knowledge for the story that was sometimes overused. As a Mexican American woman, I also found disengaged when the book explained facets of urban and rural Mexican culture rather than making it feel like a natural part of the setting and Noemi as a character. Maybe this is to set Noemi as a direct contrast to the characters she encounters at High Place. When Noemi travels to High Place, that is where the story really began for me ... The most engaging and beautifully disturbing parts of the novel are when Noemi dreams, in which she sees the lifeforce of the house in the living walls ... a twist on the haunted house that felt new and original, and one that I appreciated ... Be warned that there are very disturbing scenes of sexual assault, massacres of indigenous peoples, and violence done to women and children that are deeply disturbing. At times, these moments compress the Doyles into archetypal villains that are fairly irredeemable, but I don’t know that it would serve the story, or the reader, to feel sympathetic to the overt misogyny and racist violence of Howard Doyle ... The book’s homage to gothic stories in a culture and setting that has not been as widely explored before and the risks that it takes are engaging, and Noemi’s will to vanquish Howard Doyle and free herself, Catalina and even gentle Francis from the house kept me reading. If you are looking for a new take on the haunted house story for your own growing canon, Mexican Gothic is worth the exploration.
Emily Roberson
PositiveTor.comWhile the novel remains mostly faithful to the original Greek tale, by focusing the novel into Ariadne’s perspective, the reader is given the opportunity to see how much of her life is regimented and controlled by her family, and how much she learns about her own lack of agency once that control slips ... While the blooming love story between Theseus and Ariadne is at the forefront of the book, these moments also serve to empower Ariadne ... The novel is successful in adapting a well-known Greek story to make readers consider how much free will one really has in their lives, and how one can exercise it when they are manipulated by the forces of power beyond their control-the gods, their family, and even their entire nation ... a reimagining that could engage a new generation of readers to appreciate Greek mythology and re engage readers familiar with the stories to appreciate the story from Ariadne’s perspective.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
RaveTor.com... epic in scope, reminding me tonally of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, with humorous, biting depictions of the characters and towns they travel through ... There was much to admire about this book, but one thing I appreciated in particular was the omniscient narrator providing social and historical landscapes of Mexico, Texas, and Xibalba with a level of vivid, arresting detail these places don’t often get outside of travel magazines or anthropological texts, from an outsider’s point of view ... The stories and characters are integrated into this historical novel and give life to these stories in a way I have not seen before, even as an avid reader of supernatural and fantastical fiction. By using these stories and expanding on them to incorporate contemporary elements, the author does them service, bringing them to new audiences and expanding on them in her own imaginative way. The descriptions of the spirits, demons and creatures of the underworld that move through time and space are poetic; they rendered the characters in my imagination in ways both cinematic and surreal ... strikes a strong balance between the epic scope of the adventure at hand, and the rich internal lives of the characters ... what kept me reading was the deliberate way that Moreno-Garcia depicts a strong sense of time, and how our traditional stories are inextricable from our histories.
