While I really enjoyed a few of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels, I was hesitant about this one. While her release before this one, The Seventh Veil of Salome, should have been right up my alley, I ended up giving up on it fairly early. It also had a bit of a dual/multi timeline and narrator thing going on and I just ended up not quite being as interested in some of them to keep reading.
When I saw this one also involved multiple time lines, I was hesitant but these are more closely connected, with only 90 years between the earliest and latest setting. The main story is centered around Minerva, a grad student originally from Mexico, studying literature in New England. Her great-grandmother Alba always told her stories about witches, which may have resulted in her fascination with the author Beatrice Tremblay, who attended the school Minerva is studying at in the 1930s, when her roommate Virginia disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The novel goes back and forth between Minerva in 1998, Alba at 18 in 1908, and Tremblay’s journals and unpublished manuscripts documenting the fall semester of 1934 which Minerva has finally been given access to for her thesis work.
Alba’s timeline took me the longest to get into because Moreno-Garcia is heavily leaning into tropes and familiar conventions with that character initially- the country girl dazzled by the sophisticated, cultured man from the city who is so obviously bad news. The fact that he is her uncle only adds to the creepiness factor. As a reader, you likely have some general ideas of where this might go and hope it won’t, but she manages to pull it all together, and the multiple timelines prevent it from feeling too much like a cliche.
This is definitely a darker take on witches (and more traditional in that way) than the market trends have portrayed lately which have focused more on the softer or misunderstood side of witches. This would definitely be a good choice for a spooky October read. Plus with Minerva’s 90s setting, lots of fun references to 90s alt rock soundtracks.