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A review by asolis
Piñata by Leopoldo Gout
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
3.0
Carmen brings her daughters with her to Mexico while she works on renovating an abbey - built on and from an Aztec temple - into a swanky new hotel. A local woman warns Carmen that her daughter is in danger of spiritual possession, strange things start happening, and when a hidden chamber in the abbey is exposed during construction, the supernatural activity escalates.
A jobsite accident causes the family to go home, but the weirdness doesn't get left behind in the motherland. Back in New York, Carmen must figure out what is happening, and how to save her family.
I wanted to like this book, but it's ended up a solid medium for me. It started rather slowly, but I was engaged. It's just that the writing itself was often disappointing. A lot of sudden visions of darkness and the underworld that felt like they were mimicking cinematic convention but that didn't quite land in writing. Sometimes clunky, a fair amount of "tell" rather than "show," and several things slipped past the copyeditors.
It also felt like the author was trying to raise awareness about a lot. Femicide, colonization, discrimination, immigration, police brutality. Some of it felt forced.
In some ways I liked the ending.I liked that it came down to the women and Yoltzi. I liked that the family ultimately turned inward, with love. But casting the spirits as being too bent on revenge didn't fully work for me. Did the old woman's closure make it better, or did we just get a dismissal of the very real harms of colonialism and ancestral trauma, a la "get over it"? And Yoltzi's seeming total sacrifice had a touch of a Native equivalent of "magical negro" plot devices.
A jobsite accident causes the family to go home, but the weirdness doesn't get left behind in the motherland. Back in New York, Carmen must figure out what is happening, and how to save her family.
I wanted to like this book, but it's ended up a solid medium for me. It started rather slowly, but I was engaged. It's just that the writing itself was often disappointing. A lot of sudden visions of darkness and the underworld that felt like they were mimicking cinematic convention but that didn't quite land in writing. Sometimes clunky, a fair amount of "tell" rather than "show," and several things slipped past the copyeditors.
It also felt like the author was trying to raise awareness about a lot. Femicide, colonization, discrimination, immigration, police brutality. Some of it felt forced.
In some ways I liked the ending.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Body horror, Bullying, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Genocide, Gore, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Violence, Blood, Police brutality, Medical content, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Religious bigotry, Car accident, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Alcohol, Colonisation, Classism, Deportation