A review by bklassen
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I really wanted to love this one. I’m a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia (SMG!) and her writing, especially her willingness or even passion for writing in other genres. I adored Mexican Gothic, Velvet Was the Night, and really enjoyed The Beautiful Ones and Gods of Jade and Shadow. I love the settings and the characters and the writing. 

Silver Nitrate just didn’t hit like I wanted it to. There were certainly things that I really loved, like Monserrat (or Momo, for short) Tristan. She is so good at writing layer and multi-faceted characters. They’re not perfect. They struggle. They have strengths and weakness, and their humanity can either get in their way or push them to be better. I especially love that SMG lets her female characters be cruel, harsh, less than beautiful, selfish, petty, acerbic, and just plain flawed. She lets them be real. 

While Momo is stubborn, cynical, bold, brave, brash, and the farthest thing from meek and simpering as you can get, Tristan is selfish, vain, flippant, cowardly, and often thoughtless. However, you can really feel the deep friendship the two share as they’ve been friends since childhood, despite their clashing personalities and small spats. 

Part of my disconnect with this book could be that it has a very slow pace, the horror didn’t feel very horrible (this book didn’t really scare me, and I wanted to be scared), and the subject matter of old school horror films just doesn’t really interest me. This book has a lot of “easter eggs” and tidbits dropped about old school Mexican cinema, especially low budget horror, as well as some more popular American horror films, but there was so much name dropping in this that it was making me go cross-eyed. Perhaps a lover of silver screen cinema would have connected with it more. 

I wanted this book to be scarier than it was, and the only scene that truly scared me was when Montserrat was in the old house and could feel a presence there. I wanted more of that. The villain didn’t really feel that scary to me, and while Nazi occultism has so much there to work with (Indiana Jones, anyone), it just didn’t really connect with me.