abditoryalive 's review for:

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

4.0

challenging emotional tense slow-paced

---

I lifted the needles and played this melody. For remembrance. Once I told Vera about the transmigration of souls. Existence is a wheel and upon itself it turns, like a record turns. And she's a melody now, and she's a flash of colour on the screen. 

🎥Setting: Old Hollywood glamour meets the golden age of cinema. A world of dazzling illusions, romance, darkness and the intoxicating pull of fame. The Seventh Veil of Salome is beautifully researched and absorbing, evoking both opulence and decay. 
 

"But it could also be resplendent. A time of legends and mythmaking" 

🍇Feminist retelling: The focus here is not the dance of the seven veils, but about agency, power and survival spanning two different time periods when women's choices were limited -> non existent. All three POV's Salome, Nancy and Vera explore aspects of this. Whether in ancient palaces or the smoke-filled studios of Old Hollywood, each woman fights to reclaim her own narrative in an era that seeks to define her.

🎥  Slow Pacing: Some sections drag, particularly Salome's. I was the least interested in her POV as I feel her story leans more into mood/aesthetic reading rather than momentum or driving the plot forwards. 

🍇 Nancy: She is compelling, deeply flawed,  and utterly frustrating.  She’s ambitious, knife sharp, and a woman willing to do whatever it takes to survive in a cutthroat world. I loved her, I hated her - and could not look away from her POV for a minute - like watching a car crash.

 🎥(SIDE NOTE:) This is my ... sixth Silvia novel (I will read anything this woman writes at this point) and I'm really noticing she writes 'mother' characters in a very particular way. Morally grey, somewhere between prison warden and protector - which makes sense in context but is also kind of terrifying. Her mother figures are the pragmatic survivors of the worlds they live in. Honestly makes me appreciate
 my own mother more.
 
🍇  Bittersweet Ending. Silvia Moreno-Garcia style - always haunting, with a melancholic weight, I always know she's going to hurt me. Her endings are consistently beautiful, inevitable and coloured with quiet tragedy - and this one is no different.  There's no neat resolution, no perfect justice, just the lingering echoes of choices made, power reclaimed, and the ghosts of what might have been. The conclusion stays with you, unsettling but somehow still satisfying (much like life sometimes).  


💋Fans of: Madeline Millers Circe, Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo