By Kathleen Uy, Librarian I (Adult/Teen Services) Montgomery County Public Libraries, White Oak Library
Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020)
This gothic story set in 1950s Mexico begins with the very beautiful, rich and intelligent socialite Noemí Taboada. She is a young woman who is expected to marry, but instead would rather attend the university to study anthropology.
After her father receives a distressing letter from her cousin Catalina, who recently rather hurriedly married an Englishman and moved to a very remote area of Mexico, he dispatches his daughter to investigate Catalina’s allegations against her new husband. Noemi arrives at the High Place mansion, a rotting English manor house built above a long-closed silver mine, to find Catalina bedridden and mentally unwell.
Noemi becomes further unsettled by her cousin’s new family. The more she learns about them the more the family appears to be as rotten as the house itself with its mold-ridden walls and decaying furnishings. This atmospheric book will remind readers of classics like “Jane Eyre” or “Rebecca,” but with a decidedly more feminist female protagonist. The book manages to deliver a true gothic read with a side of commentary on colonialism and racism in Mexico.
Other GOOD Reads
Jackal: a novel
by Erin E. Adams (2022)
Liz, a 32-year-old Black woman, returns to her predominantly white hometown to attend a wedding, when the bride’s child disappears in the woods.
Just Like Home
by Sarah Gailey (2022)
Vera Crowder returns to her childhood home at the behest of her dying mother. But what is lying under the bed? And what’s behind the locked basement door?
The Sanatorium
by Sarah Pearse (2021)
An old sanatorium in the Swiss Alps turned into a five-star hotel. When a blizzard hits and dead bodies start turning up, who
will come out of this alive?
