Gripping and cinematic, the novel’s worlds of El Paso past and present will bewitch and enrapture.
A busy El Paso lawyer embarks on a supernatural journey when she uncovers a startling truth about her great-aunt.
In 1943, Elena Eduviges Montoya, called “Nena” by her family, resigns herself to serving her older sisters as a housemaid and nanny while World War II rages, “biding her time until the Germans attacked.” But one sweltering afternoon, Nena has a vision foretelling the death of their landlord, and that night she receives a midnight visit from black-clad Sister Benedicta de la Cruz, who transports her to 1792—when El Paso del Norte was still part of New Spain—and leads her to a strange convent, where the nuns are likewise afflicted by visions. Nena learns she must remain in this enchanted realm in order to undertake training to channel “La Vista,” that part of God that comprises nature and chaos, before she can return home. Fast forward to the present day, and Nena’s great-niece, Marta, juggles her roles as a lawyer at a struggling firm, a mother to two boys, and a wife stuck in a humdrum marriage. All this gets turned upside down when an alarming kitchen incident involving the elderly Nena, burned rice, and handsome firemen brings Nena to live with Marta’s family. After Marta has an unnerving experience with seemingly supernatural soot (“when she opens her eyes again, the wall continues to blink, soot there, soot gone”), Nena comes clean about a secret she’s kept for a lifetime: She gave birth to a baby, Rosa, during her time on “the other side.” The revelation sets the women on a path to recover Rosa from the shadowy realm of El Paso del Norte. Alternating chapters between Nena’s past and Marta’s present, Jaramillo braids the storylines together like a mal de ojo bracelet, seamlessly weaving in Spanish language terms and Mexican cultural touchstones such as pozole, rebozo, and el aquelarre. Jaramillo’s atmospheric prose conjures the dusty El Paso of the past, and depictions of La Vista vibrate with “colorful knots of waves,” glowing indigo, maroon, and bright pink, yielding “a wild spell, like yeast in the air.” This riveting page-turner affirms the adage, “Family stories teach us how to live. Family secrets teach us to kill parts of ourselves.”
Gripping and cinematic, the novel’s worlds of El Paso past and present will bewitch and enrapture.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781668033210
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Primero Sueño Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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