I had heard of Isabel Cañas’s The Hacienda as Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, but in Mexico. When I found that it wasn’t literally a Rebecca retelling in Mexico, I put it down because I expected Mrs. Danvers, not priests. This probably says more about me than the book. But I did intend to check it back out when my expectations calmed down.
(If I saw all the Mexican Gothic comparisons beforehand, I might have finished it the first time.)
This review shouldn’t be about either book, but it’s hard since that’s how it’s been hyped. While I certainly saw similarities with Rebecca and Mexican Gothic, The Hacienda really stands on its own and separately as a solid and straightforward ghost story.
After tragedy and insecurity, Beatriz enters a loveless but seemingly secure marriage so she and her mother can be okay. Beatriz is being perfectly reasonable for wanting her base Maslow’s needs met, and her mom is perfectly reasonable for rejecting the new son-in-law and seeing that Maslow’s unmentioned and anachronistic hierarchy is flawed.
Anyway, the house is haunted by Beatriz’s husband’s first wife (dead), Beatriz’s sister-in-law (Juana, alive), and the house itself (also alive). It’s not clear how much the three are splitting the haunting, but they’re all definitely participating. I suspect Juana did a decent amount of the haunting that was accredited to the first wife. But maybe not. Either way Beatriz befriends a local witch priest, Andrés, to fix up the house so her mother can move in. Chaos and death and priest smooching ensue; Beatriz escapes all three and leaves.
The supporting characters were the weakest part of the story. We saw too much or not enough of their backgrounds and motivations. I would have rather they be mysterious and looming OR nuanced and fleshed out characters. Instead they were bits of both and it felt unsatisfying. This goes for the husband, the SiL, and even Andrès, the secondary protagonist.
But that didn’t take away from my enjoyment. In the end, it’s a fun creepy haunted house story. The ghosts are threatening, but the living are more dangerous. The bad guys were vanquished and the good guys… well, they didn’t live happily ever after, but they survived.