#Review - Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Untamed Shore
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 16 February 2023
Available as: HB, 282pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529426328

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance copy of this new UK edition of Untamed Shore to consider for review.

Silvia Morena-Garcia is an impressively versatile author, ranging between genres (SFF, romance, thriller, horror) and themes and, in my experience, she never disappoints.

In Untamed Shore she gives us a noir-tinged thriller which evokes classic films of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Close your eyes and it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine this story taking place in black and white, acted out by the chiselled profiles and dangerous beauties of Golden Age Hollywood - even though it's set slightly later, in 1979. That dating is important as it gives Untamed Shore the ability to reference and build on this stock of imagery so that Viridiana, our protagonist (herself named for a film heroine) comments knowingly about actors, themes and atmosphere.

And indeed that's entirely fitting. Into Viridiana's provincial world, to the little town in Baja California where she spends her summer watching the dead sharks rot, dodging strutting boys and resisting her mother's plots to marry her off - into this world comes a trio of fascinating strangers, American tourists who've taken a house for the summer.

Introduced to them by her father's friend, 'the Dutchman'  Reinier, Viridiana takes on the role of guide, translator and secretary to Ambrose, his wife Daisy, and her brother, Gregory. There's a certain implied louche glamour to the the three, a sense of a past, of money and, soon, of danger. Staying in their house, Viridiana is well placed first to pry out secrets - to overhear things but also to locate what's not being said - and then, after a death, to become involved in those secrets.

At the same time, Moreno-Garcia shows us a young woman growing up in this back of nowhere town, yearning for the bright lights of Paris, or of Mexico City where her father is. But don't fall into the trap of seeing the place or its people as unsophisticated or backward. That's the mistake that Ambrose, Daisy and Gregory make, as well as others who come arrive later, once the trouble starts. This book isn't written from the perspective of the strangers who come to town - strangers who don't even bother to speak the language - rather it's an affectionate and almost loving depiction of things (even if it is a warts-and-all depiction) from the inside.

What matters to Viridiana is her future - that life away from the town. She studies the impact on that future of all the undercurrents here, the swirls of gossip and reputation, the formalities represented by the Mayor or the local policeman. She understands - as the strangers don't - what can be managed, whether through an understanding of who is in what card game on a Friday night or from knowledge of who has interests where.

The book put me in mind, to a degree,  of the typology of true crimes set out by the author George Orwell in his essay The Decline of the English Murder. Writing during the Second World War, Orwell lamented the displacement of the classic domestic murder (generally a middle aged husband ridding himself of his no longer wanted wife) beloved of the British Sunday papers, by a more public style of killing - and by younger killers, of both sexes, swimming in an atmosphere of drink, dance halls and flickering Hollywood. In actual fact the first type of killing remains with us of course - domestic violence doesn't go away so easily (as we see here) - but the second sort is and was incontestably more glamorous, if that's not a crass word to use, and Moreno-Garcia hits all the same notes here in telling a story that has femmes fatales, guns, hoodlums and duplicity in spades alongside a genuine streak of moral ambiguity. 

I don't think there's anyone in this book who is altogether admirable, but nearly everyone is understandable - Moreno-Garcia gives us complex and real characters and to a degree you can sympathise with most of them (though I didn't take to Ambrose).

If you've read Moreno-Garcia's recent books, you will recognise some of the themes and settings here  in Untamed Shore. Again we have a young woman growing up in a backwater who wishes to go places, a gloriously evocative portrayal of place and of being a certain age, watching an exciting world and fearing it will pass one by. While in others of this author's book these things come together via the supernatural, here it's a more prosaic, if also more criminal, route - it'll take every bit of Viridiana's determination to pull herself out of this mess - but there is a great sense here of her takes a chance in both hands when it comes. It's a wonderful read, and I'm glad to see this UK edition so that more readers can find there way to this story.

Strongly recommended.

For more about Untamed Shore, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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(Tim Green)

Velvet Was the Night
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 17 August 2021
Availablele as: HB, 281pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB):  9781529417944

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Velvet Was the Night to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the Social Media Blast.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an awesomely talented and eclectic author. There is much more to he writing than her recent stand-out horror Mexican Gothic, in recent years she has has books published across multiple genres including SFF, romance, thriller, noir, and, yes, horror, often with crossover elements but always with action and heart.

In Moreno-Garcia's latest, Velvet Was the Night, we meet Maite, a young secretary in a Mexico City legal firm. Maite is something of a daydreamer and even perhaps what would now be called a geek - happiest retreating in the evenings to be with her books, records and comics. At 30, the patriarchal society around her (Maite's mother and sister included) are inclined to judge her as virtually an old maid, and Maite has bought into this to a degree, but I sensed that she gets far more fun and commitment from her own interests - and especially her favourite comic, "Secret Romance" - than she's had from any actual partner.

Also prominent here is Elvis, a tough who's part of a clandestine government militia used to break up demonstrations and target radicals. This is Mexico in the early 70s, a country haunted by the spectre of revolution, awash - or so the government believes - with Communist agents and sympathisers, and deeply penetrated by CIA operatives. Elvis has had a hard life and membership of the "Hawks" (who really existed, as Moreno-Garcia explains in her Afterword) has given him discipline, a purpose in life and, of course, a living.

The two figures circle round one another after Maite's neighbour Leonora, a well-to-do student affiliated with the radical scene, vanishes. There is a classic McGuffin in the form of a missing camera and film, which all sides want, and which might either be the spark for an uprising, evidence of oppression and torture, or a useful bargaining chip in the struggle between different arms of the security forces (of which there is a veritable alphabet soup). Maite is, at the start, wholly innocent of the deep waters she's getting into. She just wants paying for looking after Leonora's cat, so that she can get her car back from the mechanics and not have to travel to work on the bus, exposed to the attentions of gropers and worse. But in the best traditions of noir, innocence is no defence and if she wants to survive, Maite's going to have to wise up very quickly to the world she's in...

I loved this book, which - while being a wholly different story and set earlier, has thematic continuity with Moreno-Garcia's Untamed Shore, also featuring a young woman who becomes involved in murky goings on, and who ends up leaving her hometown for a more glamorous life in Mexico City. There is a similar examination of a woman's place in a male-dominated society, and a similar nuanced treatment which refuses to cast things in terms of victimhood: Maite is dissatisfied with her life and in particular her job, but she has carved out a space for herself in which she can live on her own terms. Like Viridiana in Untamed Shore, Maite is a quick learner and even more, a brave person who continues her investigation - as it has become - even when the warning signs begin to appear that she may be getting too deep. She's drawn, I think, at some level, to a potential adventure - her reading of sensationalist comics priming her to the potential for plots, conspiracies and Gothic revelations. Maite was already coping with her mundane office life by weaving a fictive world peopled by characters (boyfriends, enemies, allies) from her reading so it's perhaps not a big step to find herself in the kind of story they might inhabit.

Of course, this exposes Maite to real dangers that threaten the little world she has made, and which won't neatly resolve themselves in the last panel. Elvis (his codename, but which he prefers to his real name) is, he discovers, in something of a similar position with his best friend (his only friend) AWOL and his boss, the enigmatic El Mago, issuing increasingly frantic orders (such as to rough up a priest - which Elvis, though not at all religious, considers to be crossing a line). For both Maite and Elvis, reality and fiction seem to be crossing over and certainties dissolving. For both, it is perhaps a process of coming awake, even as life is getting darker and stranger.

The action here exposes that darkness - a period of Mexico's history when protesters were beaten and shot, opposition figures disappeared and factions within the ruling party struggled for primacy. It is a period that I know very little about and Moreno-Garcia's story shines a bit of light on it, while resisting stereotypes (Elvis and his crew are not, for example, bad men so much as poor ones doing a job) and allowing her characters room to breathe and to express themselves in the culture of the time, particularly its music (which plays a similar role here to that of cinema in Untamed Shore). Moreno-Garcia has included in the book her Spotify playlist for the book, which is well worth checking out. 

I hope that in the description above I haven't made the book sound too doozy. It is, above all, a great read, atmospheric, exciting and soulful, bringing alive a particular place and time. Moreno-Garcia allows her characters to speak, more, she allows them to sing, and what a song this is. I'd strongly recommend.

You can find out more about Velvet Was the Night from the Jo Fletcher Books website here, which includes links to purchase, as well as from the other social media listed on the poster below.

#Review - The Return of the Sorceress by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Illustration by Fang Xinyu,
design by Pablo Defending

The Return of the Sorceress
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Subterranean Press, 30 June 2021
Available as: HB, 95pp
Source: Purchased copy
ISBN: 9781645240303

In fantasy, one frequently encounters young warriors and magicians, adventurers with a destiny. They discover their talents and make names for themselves, transforming their societies and often assuming power.

The Return of the Sorceress is a refreshing contrast with that. In this book, Moreno-Garcia shows us Yalxi, who is rather tired. She has been there, done that - was until recently the Supreme Mistress of the Guild of Sorcerers - and lost it all. It's not that Yalxi's old in years - she's in her 30s - but the powerful magics she and her kind manipulate, based on gems inhabited by temperamental spirits, consume the user, forcing them to become more and more dependent on that unholy power.

And having lost the Diamond Heart to her treacherous lover Xellah - who then had her imprisoned in a dungeon and literally bled alive - Yalxi now lacks the thing that staved off decay, that kept her young, that made her strong. She must have the Diamond Heart back!

So begins a story of desperation, subterfuge and cunning, as Yalxi levers every bit of power she can find, every scrap of knowledge, hiding out in the worst parts of town, unsure who to trust and remembering the life that's brought her to this point. In a relatively few pages, Moreno-Garcia gives a vivid and engaging portrait of a fantasy city, from its marshy underpinnings and decaying mansions to brassy parades and festivals and the legacy of invasion and conquest. It is so vivid, I could have lingered and lingered on the streets and in the seedy palaces and halls.

But The Return of the Sorceress isn't about world building, it's about the relationships that Yalxi built, and those she broke. One feels a weight of unspoken, but implied, business between her and Xellah, from their daring overthrow of their master Teotah, former owner of the Heart, to their failure to destroy it, to their rule of the city - bringing with it the supplies of blood they needed for their magic. This trajectory isn't detailed but one can sense the compromises, the betrayals and the frustrations that led up to the present, a present which places Yalxi in great danger, should Xellah recapture her.

It seems the best thing to do would be to run away, and several times Yalxi's advised to do that. But Yalxi isn't done, there are powers she believes that she can call on to restore her fortune. And at this point I was really pleased and surprised to see how Moreno-Gracia spins the story into a moral dilemma, power and revenge beckoning, danger all around and very few good options. 

Overall, it was great fun to read with vivid characters and done in splendid shades of moral grey - nobody here has clean hands. 

Very enjoyable.

For more information about The Return of the Sorceress, and to order a copy, see the publisher's website here. 

 

Review - Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Cover by 2Faced Design

Untamed Shore
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Polis Books, 27 February 2020
HB, 282pp; e; audio, 8 hr 1 min (narr. Maria Liatis)

I listened to Untamed Shore as an audiobook downloaded from an online subscription service.

Silvia Morena-Garcia is an impressively versatile author, ranging between genres (SFF, romance, thriller) and themes and, in my experience, she never disappoints.

In Untamed Shore she gives us a noir-tinged thriller which evokes classic films of the 40s, 50s and 60s - it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine this story taking place in black and white, acted out by the chiselled profiles and dangerous beauties of Hollywood - even though it's set later, in 1979. Actually, that setting lends Untamed Shore the ability to reference and build on this stock of imagery so that Viridiana, our protagonist (herself named for a film heroine) comments knowing about actors, themes and atmosphere.

And indeed that's entirely fitting. Into Viridiana's provincial world, to the little town in Baja California where she spends her summer watching the dead sharks rot, dodging strutting boys and resisting her mother's plots to marry her off - into this world comes a trio of glamorous strangers, American tourists who've taken a house for the summer.

Introduced to them by her father's friend, the Dutchman Reinier, Viridiana takes on the role of guide, translator and secretary to Ambrose, his wife Daisy, and her brother, Gregory. There's a certain implied louche glamour to the the three, a sense of a past, of money and, soon, of danger. Staying in their house, Viridiana is well placed first to pry out secrets - to overhear things, find things - and then, after a death, to become involved in those secrets.

At the same time Moreno-Garcia shows us a young woman growing up in this back of nowhere town, yearning for the bright lights of Paris or of Mexico City where her father is. But don't fall into the trap of seeing the place as or its people as unsophisticated or backward. That's the mistake that Ambrose, Daisy and Gregory make, as well as others who come to the place later after the trouble starts. This book isn't written from the perspective of the strangers who come to town - strangers who don't even bother to speak the language - rather it's an affectionate and almost loving depiction of things (even is a warts-and-all depiction) from the inside.

What matters rot Viridiana is her future - that life away from the town - and she studies the effects on that future off all the undercurrents here, the swirls of gossip and reputation, the formalities represented by the Mayor or the local policeman and which can be managed through an understanding of who is in what card game on a Friday night or who has interests where.

The book put me in mind of a typology of crimes set out by the author George Orwell in his essay The Decline of the English Murder. Writing during the Second World War, he lamented the displacement of the classic domestic murder (generally a middle aged husband ridding himself of his no longer wanted wife) beloved of the British Sunday papers, by a more public style of killing - and by younger killers, of both sexes, swimming in an atmosphere of drink, dance halls and flickering Hollywood. In actual fact the first type of killing remains with us of course - domestic violence doesn't go away so easily (as we see here) - but the second sort is and was incontestably more glamorous and Moreno-Garcia hits all the notes here in telling a story that has femmes fatales, guns, hoodlums and duplicity in spades alongside a genuine streak of moral ambiguity. I don't think there's anyone in this book who is altogether admirable, but nearly everyone is understandable - Moreno-Garcia gives us complex and real characters and to a degree you can sympathise with m most of them (though I didn't take to Ambrose).

If you've read Moreno-Garcia's last book, Gods of Jade and Shadow, you might see this as something as a companion with some similar themes. Again we have a young woman growing up in a backwater who wishes to go places and who takes the chance in both hands when it comes. There, the opportunity is an unlikely liaison with the god of death. Here, it's a more prosaic, if also more criminal, route - but death features as strongly here, and it'll take every bit of Viridiana's determination to pull herself out of this mess.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and Maria Liatis's narration is excellent throughout, conveying both Viridiana's characters and, somehow, the characters of the little town itself.

Strongly recommended.

For more about the book, see the author's website here.

Review - The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Beautiful Ones
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Thomas Dunne Books, 24 October 2017
HB, 323pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Moreno-Garcia's new novel is an engaging fantasy-romance with a hint of magic. It's set in Levrene, a country like... well, perhaps a bit like somewhere in central Europe, on a planet a bit like Earth, around the turn of the 20th century. While clearly an imaginary world, many of the place names, both local (Loisail, Montipouret, Luquennay) and remote (Port Anselm, Yehenn, Carivatoo), evoke that, as does the atmosphere of carriages, telegraphs and newly built railways.

Despite these stirrings of modernity it is still a ferociously traditional society, not to say patriarchal, with women's roles in particular fiercely constrained by the rules of etiquette and the fear of what Society will make of any scandal. A woman's only asset is, it seems, her reputation.

Against this background we follow the lives of Antonina (Nina) Beaulieu, a young woman from the country in the capital for her first Grand Season and Hector Auvray ("a castaway who had washed up on a room of velvet curtains and marble floors").

Nina would rather be at home collecting beetles and exploring the woods. She'd certainly prefer not to be under the dominion of her martinet Aunt Valérie. Valérie despises Nina and takes delight in being cruel to her: Nina, young and inexperienced, chaffed at the restrictions imposed on her and unknowingly torments Valérie with visions of what she has lost.

Hector is a performing magician - and here we meet the first feature that makes this book a little different. Hector can, in reality, perform magic - he can move objects by thought alone and has made a spectacular career of this. The place of magic in this book is well thought out - it's not high fantasy, we have no duelling mages here, and on the whole, "Talents" as they're called are accepted, if treated with a bit of suspicion. But there's no doubt Hector is an outsider to the carefully modulated social set who call themselves The Beautiful Ones.

This isn't only because of his abilities - Hector is of humble birth and that isn't forgotten, but he has amassed a fortune, and The Beautiful Ones do crave money for the upkeep of their ragged castles and their lavish lifestyles. ("Nothing matters more than money to us, the proper people who walk down these city streets in pristine gloves and silk-lined garments").

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (picture by Martin Dee)

In fact, the quest for money via an advantageous marriage is ever present in this book, giving distinct echoes of Austen: Aunt Valérie in particular wouldn't be out of place in a drawing room weighing up newly arrived officers and considering which daughter should pair off with which. But there's more to Valérie than that - a tragically romantic past that has marked her life and drives here still. It wouldn't be too much to say she's the presiding spirit of this book, setting much of the plot in motion and pulling strings behind the scenes to get what she wants. It's a chilling, at times frightening role that makes one both hate and pity her. Warped by having had to conform herself and enter a loveless, childless marriage ten years, she's something of a cross between Lady MacBeth and Anna Karenina, she's now determined to inflict the same on others, her own hatred a measure of the love she believes she could have had.

I enjoyed the way that Moreno-Garcia makes Valérie both the voice, and the victim, of the stuffily rigidity society. It's a very character-driven, people-focussed story - beyond names and cultural trappings we don't learn a great deal about wider society, we don't see ordinary people at work or see anything of the politics (apart from learning, in a couple of throwaway lines, that there is a King). Yet by skewering that one one aspect - the position of women in the more privileged layer - we can I think infer the rest.

A very enjoyable read, with characters who felt real to me and about whom I found myself caring a great deal, and gripping to the very end.