This is hands down my favorite book of Moreno-Garcia since Mexican Gothic. I don’t know about anyone else, but I found some of her other works not hitting it for me. This one had it all, memorable characters, a very strong plot, and a great ending.
The Bewitching follows in essence three distinct timelines that all come together in the end.
Timeline one follows Minerva, an international graduate student from Mexico that is currently enrolled in Stoneridge College in Massachusetts in 1998. Minerva is trying to write a thesis about Beatrice Tremblay. Tremblay is a former horror writer that is not well known and a also a former student of Stoneridge College.
Timeline two follows Tremblay’s writings and in it is told in Tremblay’s first person point of view about what events took place at the college and the disappearance of her roommate Virginia that inspired her novel “The Vanishing.”
The third and last timeline follows Minerva’s great grandmother, Alba, in Mexico in 1908 where her uncle comes to play a visit and something mysterious seems to be stalking their family and land.
Alba and Minerva are very well developed. I felt like I got to know the character of Beatrice just a bit less than the other two characters, but think that’s the nature of how the timelines were set up and told to the reader. The other characters we get in this are memorable too. Minerva’s best friend at the college, Hideo, but also the neighborhood cat she takes care of, Alba’s brother Tadeo, her mother, and her uncle. Beatrice and her roommate Virginia, wealthy local girl Carolyn, and Virginia’s fiance.
I liked the flow of this book. I know other readers said it was too slow. But I actually thought Silver Nitrate was worse to me in terms of flow, and only because I fell asleep while reading that book a few times. This book had me reading and wondering what was going to happen next. I honestly loved Alba’s storyline the most. None of the story-lines were bad in my opinion, I thought they all worked very well together, especially once we get to the end and see the echoes of one action across the other ones. I am always fascinated about tales of witchcraft across other cultures, so we get a lot about witches, warlocks, and gifts in this one that we see play out across the other storylines. I could read a whole book about Mexican horror frankly and never get tired of it. And this book had it’s Gothic elements too which I appreciated.
The main timelines (Minerva’s) takes place in Massachusetts during the summer, but most of her research into Beatrice’s friend’s vanishing takes place during the fall/winter and you get to delight in something dark and shadowy happening across the seasons. I won’t lie pretty early on at least in one of the timelines, you are going to figure out who is doing what, but two of the timelines did surprise me, and one you figure out what is going on in the one, it makes it easy to guess about the other one. So even though I realized who was up to what, I still enjoyed the ride to get there.
The biggest thing I am going to say is you can see the love that Moreno-Garcia has for horror. The opening paragraphs let you know you are going to be in for something dark and the character of Minerva loves horror through and through. Won’t lie, was jarring to read about how Lovecraft mentored other horror writers. Still racist, though. But I was actually interested more in him because of what was revealed about his biography in this one.
As I said the ending was quite satisfying. 5 stars!
