Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading Miss Silvia’s work, and I have to say….I enjoyed every bit of it.

This book is about a girl named Noemi, and how she was ordered by her father to go to High Place, where her cousin, Catalina, is. Catalina wrote a strange letter to her uncle, asking him to send her cousin up to High Place, where the Doyles live. When it looked like Noemi was about to say no, her father made her her a deal: go and see what’s going on with Catalina, and when she comes back, that’s when he’s going to let her enroll in National University so she can study anthropology. She agreed, and off she went to the Mexican Countryside to High Place, where her cousin was with the Doyles.

When she got there...oh boy. The Doyles basically laid down some rules for her, and each time Noemi does something outside of the rules, they turn into the King and Queen and does the lovely Black Panther meme, “We don’t do this here” each time, and it frustrates her that this family is like this. Soon weird things start happened to Noemi-like she starts to have deams of the past, about what happened to Ruth and how she shot everyone and left Howard Doyle alive, and what happened in the past with Doyle and his incestual marriages, and also started to have dreams about her brother in law and Catalina’s husband, Virgil. She also started sleepwalking again while she was having these dreams, some of them really, really bad (mostly about Virgil, which makes me go yikes sometimes).

And Catalina. Poor Catalina. She’s stuck up in her room, not being able to get out because she’s sick. So Noemi is doing things for her, like going to a medicine woman named Marta, who gave her a tincture. Catalina took too much and had a seizure, which worried her, but the family thought that Noemi brought opium that triggered the seizure, but she really didn’t, and Francis, the boy she is close to and has to speak Spanish to because of the walls and the thing called the gloom that is in the house can hear

Speaking of the gloom, the whole house is covered in mold and darkness and they don’t believe in lights...I probably would’ve survived this house or left the moment I start having freaky dreams. But the worst part is that Howard Doyle is a “god” who lived for a three hundred years by transferring himself into the mind of someone else, have children with someone in his family, and then prepare them so they can be vessels of some sort. But she is going to marry Francis, the guy she liked.

But, you know those Doyles. Always one step ahead of them.

First they did the wedding backwards-they feasted first, then went up to dying Howard’s room to get married. But then after the wedding, things didn’t go so well. First off, Virgil came into her room and tried to rape Noemi, but thanks to the gloom she pushed back from him, knocking him out and taking the tincture he had in her pocket. Then she ran to Catalina’s room and tried to leave with her, but oh no, that didn’t happen.

The maid went feral and nearly choked the hell out of Noemi, but when Francis came and tore her off of her, she tried to choke Francis, so she pretty much killed her with the razor, but they weren’t fast enough for Florence. She darted out, in the hallway, WITH A GUN, and forced them into Howard’s room, where the doctor was tending to him, and said that it was time. They told FRANCIS to come to the old, pustible old man and they bowed their heads, said something before Catalina grabbed the doctor’s scalpel and stabbed the hell out of Howard’s eye.

Before they could even leave the room Florence and Noemi fought with a gun, and Florence broke Noemi’s hand before Francis tore her (I swear I feel for this boy because good god he’s been thrown all over the place) off of his new bride and shot her after rolling around fighting like wildcats. Then once Florence was dead and Noemi shot Howard, she, Francis and Catalina ran out of the house and underground, where they found the source of the gloom…

In which freaked me the hell out because IT WAS FUCKING AGNES.

Agnes got buried alive, and a whole lot of fungus and mushrooms and everything sprouted around her, and Francis and Catalina told Noemi not to look, but she did. And she saw what happened to poor Agnes, BUT OH NO

Like his (not-so-sucky) counterpart from Devil May Cry, Virgil appears, saying that Howard will die, and that he controls the gloom now, telling Noemi to drop the knife, and that “I should’ve let you bite your own tongue (paraphrasing),” when he and Francis were fighting. BUT THE GOOD THING WAS THAT CATALINA KILLED HIM WITH THE KNIFE BY DOING THE SAME THING SHE DID TO HOWARD. Then they escaped while the house was on fire, and then at the end, Francis slept for two days, the good doctor Camarillo helped them, and they kissed three times.

I have to say, this book broke me and it deserves TEN out of TEN stars. I loved it so much, and EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT.

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