MUÑECA

In the Bay Area of the late 1960s, a young woman unleashes the magic she learned from her grandmother—which her mother warned her about—to free a spellbound heiress.

A muñeca is a Mexican rag doll, and the title of this book refers to Violeta Guzmán, who for six years—since shortly after her honeymoon—has lain in bed in her family’s century-old home, unable to speak, walk, or even sit up. The narrator, Natalia Fuentes—whose mother once worked for Violeta’s parents, the Miramontes—hears about Violeta’s malady and recognizes its symptoms as being the result of a spell rather than an illness. She’s hired by Mrs. Miramonte to be Violeta’s caregiver, but her true motive is to undo the spell with the expectation that in gratitude for her freedom, Violeta will “kick down some of her family’s wealth” to Natalia. Freeing Violeta turns out to be more complicated than expected, and Natalia finds herself not just breaking one spell, but casting many—animating a doll with Violeta’s spirit, exchanging her body with Violeta’s, and cursing Mrs. Miramontes so she hears the voices of the Native people who suffered in the mines that produced the silver to make her tea set. She even finds herself falling in love with Violeta, for whom “muñeca” is Natalia’s term of endearment. Their love story is constrained by the fact that Violeta expresses herself mainly through the body of a doll, and despite the elements of the gothic in the tale—the fading legacy dating to the time of Spanish colonialists, the vulnerable heiress and her menacing husband—it lacks the requisite creepy mood. This version does have an intriguing twist, though: The wielder of terrifying magic in the Miramontes home is no ghost, but a woman who must decide how far to take the power her grandmother taught her to use.

A woman’s exploration of her own power overshadows the gothic trappings in this imaginative novel.