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emtees's review
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Signal to Noise feels a bit like a Mexican take on The Craft, but with lowered stakes and more naturalistic characterization. It’s a story where magic is both central to the plot and beside the point, filled with difficult, often unlikeable, but very real characters who you want to root for anyway.
In 1988 Mexico City, Meche Vega is a unhappy, outcast teenager, getting through a life of dysfunctional parents and high school bullies thanks to her obsessive love of music and her two best friends, Sebastian and Daniela. After she accidentally uses music to cast a spell that injures one of her bullies, Meche goads her friends into studying magic, writing their own grimoire and amassing a collection of records that will allow them to cast spells. At first, the trio use their magic for the kinds of things fifteen-year olds might dream of: extra cash or a dance with the right boy at a party. But as their control over their magic grows, Meche begins to think magic has a different purpose - to get her revenge on all the people who are the target of her considerable anger. And once romantic drama and personal grudges are in the mix, the anger Meche has always directed at the outside world begins to turn on her friends.
Twenty years later, Meche returns to Mexico City for the first time since high school to attend funeral services for her father. Her goal is to pay the limited respect required, clean up her father’s apartment, and get back to her peaceful life in Norway. But being back in Mexico means encountering her old friends and the memories of how their last spells drove them apart, and wondering if there might be something there to salvage after all.
There was so much that I liked about this book. The handling of magic in it is very interesting. It felt like it sat on the line between fantasy and magical realism. The magic is absolutely real, but it feels very natural within the regular world of 1980’s Mexico City. There isn’t a lot of time spent defining the rules; instead, magic seems to be a natural force that different characters can access through the things they are passionate about. In the case of Meche and her friends, that means music, and the “spells” they cast while dancing to their favorite songs are some of the best scenes. The magical realism aspect fits in the way that magic seems to be mostly a teenage thing; though we see that other people can control magic, it is the teenagers who are powerful with it, and once they grow into adulthood, it doesn’t seem to fade so much as they move past it. Magic in this world seems to be part of the particular teenage period where emotions are heightened and even small things matter intensely.
The characters are the other big strength of this story. Meche is the POV character for the parts set in 2009, as well as the main POV for the 1980s scenes (Sebastian and Daniela also get POVs, as does Meche’s grandmother, Dolores, and her father, Vicente.) She is a great character because Moreno-Garcia doesn’t stint on showing us her unlikeable traits. As a teenager, Meche is sharp-tongued, angry, often rude and cruel, and deeply uncomfortable with expressing or receiving affection. As an adult she’s… honestly, kind of the same. She’s a prickly, difficult character to follow, but being in her head you see the ways that no one is harmed more by her anger than Meche herself, and root for her to fight her way past her instinct to lash out and instead make connections. The other characters are also complex and distinct. I appreciated that, unlike in some novels focused on teenagers, there is no glamorizing of teenage life here. Meche and her friends are outsiders, not in the cool, misunderstood way, but in the awkward, pimply, badly dressed and often embarrassing way. Their relationships are both intense and uncomfortable, full of stupid misunderstandings, overreactions and petty, intentional cruelties but also the unique bonds that maybe can only form at that age.
What worked less for me in this book was the balancing of some of the storylines and themes, and the pacing. A large part of the 2009-timeline plot focused on Meche cleaning out her late, estranged father’s apartment, trying to reconnect with a man she’d long ago cut out of her life. The importance of her father’s death and her mixed feelings about their relationship in this storyline felt like it should have been balanced by some kind of focus on their relationship in the 1980’s storyline, but that wasn’t really there. Vincente is a POV character in the 1980’s storyline, but his story is slight and feels disconnected from Meche’s. The emotional drive of her story as a teenager is much more focused on her relationships with her friends and with magic than it is on her father until very late in the book, and by then it felt like the author was suddenly trying to give weight to that relationship to justify it mattering so much in the future. Meanwhile, the whole book seemed to be building to a confrontation between Meche and her friend Sebastian in 1989 that was still reverberating twenty years later, but it took so long getting to that confrontation, and then kind of rushed through it, that I didn’t feel there was time to really weigh its importance to the story. The end then wrapped up pretty quickly.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia was a new author to me and I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.
In 1988 Mexico City, Meche Vega is a unhappy, outcast teenager, getting through a life of dysfunctional parents and high school bullies thanks to her obsessive love of music and her two best friends, Sebastian and Daniela. After she accidentally uses music to cast a spell that injures one of her bullies, Meche goads her friends into studying magic, writing their own grimoire and amassing a collection of records that will allow them to cast spells. At first, the trio use their magic for the kinds of things fifteen-year olds might dream of: extra cash or a dance with the right boy at a party. But as their control over their magic grows, Meche begins to think magic has a different purpose - to get her revenge on all the people who are the target of her considerable anger. And once romantic drama and personal grudges are in the mix, the anger Meche has always directed at the outside world begins to turn on her friends.
Twenty years later, Meche returns to Mexico City for the first time since high school to attend funeral services for her father. Her goal is to pay the limited respect required, clean up her father’s apartment, and get back to her peaceful life in Norway. But being back in Mexico means encountering her old friends and the memories of how their last spells drove them apart, and wondering if there might be something there to salvage after all.
There was so much that I liked about this book. The handling of magic in it is very interesting. It felt like it sat on the line between fantasy and magical realism. The magic is absolutely real, but it feels very natural within the regular world of 1980’s Mexico City. There isn’t a lot of time spent defining the rules; instead, magic seems to be a natural force that different characters can access through the things they are passionate about. In the case of Meche and her friends, that means music, and the “spells” they cast while dancing to their favorite songs are some of the best scenes. The magical realism aspect fits in the way that magic seems to be mostly a teenage thing; though we see that other people can control magic, it is the teenagers who are powerful with it, and once they grow into adulthood, it doesn’t seem to fade so much as they move past it. Magic in this world seems to be part of the particular teenage period where emotions are heightened and even small things matter intensely.
The characters are the other big strength of this story. Meche is the POV character for the parts set in 2009, as well as the main POV for the 1980s scenes (Sebastian and Daniela also get POVs, as does Meche’s grandmother, Dolores, and her father, Vicente.) She is a great character because Moreno-Garcia doesn’t stint on showing us her unlikeable traits. As a teenager, Meche is sharp-tongued, angry, often rude and cruel, and deeply uncomfortable with expressing or receiving affection. As an adult she’s… honestly, kind of the same. She’s a prickly, difficult character to follow, but being in her head you see the ways that no one is harmed more by her anger than Meche herself, and root for her to fight her way past her instinct to lash out and instead make connections. The other characters are also complex and distinct. I appreciated that, unlike in some novels focused on teenagers, there is no glamorizing of teenage life here. Meche and her friends are outsiders, not in the cool, misunderstood way, but in the awkward, pimply, badly dressed and often embarrassing way. Their relationships are both intense and uncomfortable, full of stupid misunderstandings, overreactions and petty, intentional cruelties but also the unique bonds that maybe can only form at that age.
What worked less for me in this book was the balancing of some of the storylines and themes, and the pacing. A large part of the 2009-timeline plot focused on Meche cleaning out her late, estranged father’s apartment, trying to reconnect with a man she’d long ago cut out of her life. The importance of her father’s death and her mixed feelings about their relationship in this storyline felt like it should have been balanced by some kind of focus on their relationship in the 1980’s storyline, but that wasn’t really there. Vincente is a POV character in the 1980’s storyline, but his story is slight and feels disconnected from Meche’s. The emotional drive of her story as a teenager is much more focused on her relationships with her friends and with magic than it is on her father until very late in the book, and by then it felt like the author was suddenly trying to give weight to that relationship to justify it mattering so much in the future. Meanwhile, the whole book seemed to be building to a confrontation between Meche and her friend Sebastian in 1989 that was still reverberating twenty years later, but it took so long getting to that confrontation, and then kind of rushed through it, that I didn’t feel there was time to really weigh its importance to the story. The end then wrapped up pretty quickly.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia was a new author to me and I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Gaslighting, Sexual assault, and Bullying
Minor: Alcoholism
There is an incident of pretty violent assault by bullies against a teenager. Another incident involves an adult attempting to sexually assault a teenager, who is then not believed by authorities when she reports it. There is a background storyline involving alcoholism.
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