Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. Yep, really enjoyed that one. Given where she ended it, I assume there are sequels? I'll have to check them out. Biracial, bisexual troubled kid versus Yale occultists, yes please!

Currently reading: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Now this is the kind of Victorian melodrama I'm 100% here for. A Mexican socialite in 1950 is summoned to a creepy house on a remote mountain by a letter from her newly married cousin, who alleges that her English husband has been poisoning her and that she's haunted by ghosts. While Noémi is headstrong and flighty, she's also incredibly smart and genre-savvy and knows the kind of story she's in. 

This one's disturbing as hell. It leans hard into the premise and atmosphere of rot and decay. The characters are sharply drawn and unsettling, and the story is suffused with a growing sense of dread and terror. Loving it so far.

Comments

[kore]

There's SUPPOSED to be a sequel but I think she wrote something else and now she's developing Ninth House for Amazon or something. sigh. (Writers do my bidding!)

[sabotabby]

Well, fuckity! I hope it gets adapted, then!

[omnia_mutantur]

I mostly adored Ninth House, though I share all your feelings about the spoilery part. Thanks for bumping Mexican Gothic up the list! I'm having a wicked hard time committing to a book at the moment because I'm still a little broken about Harrow, but this sounds super up my alley.

[sabotabby]

I don't think the spoilery part was super necessary (whereas the sexual violence in Mexican Gothic is).

Mexican Gothic is also pretty short, if that helps.

[mistersmearcase]

Your description of A Little Life piqued my curiosity and it's waiting for me to pick up at the library, btw.

[sabotabby]

OMG I can't wait to hear your opinion.

[mistersmearcase]

I now have it. I'm a little wary since I think you described it as a sort of torture porn. (I skimmed because I'm terribly spoiler averse.)

[mistersmearcase]

Oh yipes. Long book is long.

[sabotabby]

It is long, and at least three quarters of that length is a trauma conga line.

[mistersmearcase]

Now I'm 130 pages in and getting very curious about the constantly hinted at back story and also feeling a sense of foreboding. I'm not sure if the book is producing that or it's that I read a tiny bit of what you wrote about it (before clicking away to avoid spoilers.)

[sabotabby]

Nah, there's definitely a good sense of foreboding there without knowing what it is, I'll give her that.

[rdi]

Mexican Gothic sounds somewhat like Del Toro's Crimson Peak

[sabotabby]

It has a lot in common with it. I loved Crimson Peak and thought that it was underrated by people who didn't get what Del Toro was doing with it.

This said, Moreno-Garcia's big draw for me is that I've never met one of her female protagonists that I didn't immediately become obsessed with. I think it's that she writes female antiheroes, which is rare enough, but instead of flipping male archetypes, she takes really unusual female archetypes and twists them to be antiheroic. And I just immediately bond with them. The lead in Signal To Noise is still my favourite but this one is a close second.