Mexican Gothic Review

“That night she dreamed that a golden flower sprouted from the walls in her room, only it wasn’t… she didn’t think it a flower. It had tendrils, yet it wasn’t a vine, and next to the not-flower rose a hundred other tiny golden forms.”

I finished this book a few days ago and I’ve had to sit on how I felt about it. Noemi and her father receive a pretty distressing letter from Noemi’s cousin Catalina. Noemi decides to visit her Catalina and her new husband, Virgil. When she arrives they have strange rules and the house is a bit creepy. She starts having strange dreams and things start getting weird. Noemi hopes she can figure out what’s going on with her cousin and get out.

Overall I feel like I really enjoyed the story and it’s one I could see being played on the big screen. I was excited to see it was being adapted into a tv series. I thought the plot was clever and well thought out. It was creepy and chilling at times. Hopefully because I’ve read the book, I won’t spend the entire tv series covering my eyes. haha!

I didn’t love the style of writing. Sometimes the author used words that I didn’t know what they meant so I had to look them up. That isn’t always a bad thing, I guess. It got a bit wordy at times but I also found the writing unique. The first 2/3rds of the story feels like your typical thriller or mystery and then things get weird, like really weird and it happens instantly. I think at one point I was like “what the heck did I just read” This is when the horror piece begins to take shape. I had heard this book was disturbing but it didn’t get that way until the last 1/3 of the book. I loved the strong female characters (I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately) and I also really liked the ending. I feel like it allows the reader to make their own interpretations on what could happen next.

Based on the fact that my review is all over the place, you can see why it was hard for me to rate. I settled on a 4 because I do think that people who love genre would enjoy it (I put on my “horror hat” when I rated it) and I think the plot was well thought out.