sassafrass's Reviews > The Hacienda

i'm gonna remove this from my total for the year because i got to page 97 and just...couldn't do it any more.

i'd like to say if the publisher hadn't likened this book to mexican gothic (moreno-garcia can run laps around canas characterisation in her sleep) and the author didnt do a truly stupid interview where she claimed this book was fixing things she didn't like in REBECCA of all things then maybe i would have been able to cut it a break. but alas, even going into it blind as just a 'gothic horror/romance' you'd be disappointed.

the gothic is famous for atmosphere - crumbling buildings, decaying aristocrats, secrets in the soil, and the stretching of sanity. certainly there are texts that can go from 0-100, but those are usually things like dracula. or anything ever written by wilkie collins.

and they can get away with it because they were forerunners, and unfortunately to the modern eye a lot of the things that would freak someone out in the 1800s are such staples of the mode that they are nothing but pure comedy (see: everything jonathan harker says or does)

so when beatriz first sets foot in the house, gets jump scared about 8 times and instantly suspects foulplay/ghosts/murder/demons/everyone around her its not giving rebecca, its giving the conjuring.

which, again. not so bad! except the conjuring has something else this book doesn't have! interesting and likeable protagonists.

as mentioned with my snide mexican gothic comment earlier, the heroine in this book is uh. hm. how to put this?

okay so you know how philipa gregory (noted historical hack, eternal nemesis etc) has this real problem in her writing where every woman is like 'i will seize the crown and take part in LAW and dont care WHAT my dad says' and you're reading it like 'this seems....wildly modern and out of place for 1253'

it's the same thing here! only, it's not even able to commit to that because despite beatriz telling us repeatedly she's marrying for MONEY and to be her OWN WOMAN in the next paragraph she is crying in her bed wishing her husband was home so he could scare away the demons.

she comes off as false, even in her own narration, which COULD be clever is the writer had actually intended it and did anything with that. but as established this writer seems to just be cutting bits out of other books she liked and pasting them over not really understanding how those things work or why.

and before anyone gets the bright idea to be all 'oh so women in history didnt WANT things huh? didnt want POWER? what about [insert every queen in history etc]' i only have issue with authors who do stuff like this with their heroines without seeming to take into account any historical context, and seem to view the arenas of power women were able to operate in as lesser, and don't particularly seem to want to investigate why or how any woman who broke the mould did what she did (or how it actually ended for a lot of them)

its immersion breaking (not great for historical fiction), and also makes beatriz incredibly shallow. she's not got any real desires of her own outside of being a mouthpiece to demonstrate the author is Challenging the Genre and Doing a Feminism.

again, the heroine from mexican gothic is ALIVE. you get the sense she would be doing something if the perspective left her, whereas everyone in the hacienda would be dropped to the floor until the author required her dolls for the next scene.

also - for a novel that purports to be about Doing the Feminism why, oh why, did we need to random priest to get a perspective?

from the standpoint of 're-writing rebecca' its a misunderstanding of the source material so profound it is comical, from the lense of a novel that wants to be about female empowerment in a traditionally chauvinistic genre it undercuts the heroines voice, and from a craft perspective having a guy there who can apparently speak to the dead and knows a lot of the answers NARRATING THEM TO THE READER its shooting your tension in the KNEES.

he even gets the first chapter!!!!! (which, hysterically i didn't realise, and almost didnt realise it again when the perspective switched because these perspectives sound SO IDENTICAL)

im disappointed, and i have no idea who i could even recommend this book too? someone who has lived in a cave and seen no pop culture around horror in their entire lives?

read...literally anything else. hell, read rebecca. read DRACULA. read the wikipedia synopsis for the conjuring.

do NOT read this.