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Synopsis:

A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts— ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

Review:

In Cynthia Gómez ’s novella, Muñeca, a young woman Natalia Fuentes hears rumors of an heiress Violeta becoming comatose shortly after her marriage. For the past six years, she has been lying motionless in a bed, being taken care of by a revolving door of nurses and housemaids. Nati knows this girl from childhood, when her owb mother was one of the maids of the house, and Nati immediately suspects that Violeta is cursed. She decides she is going to go to the house, get a job as one of her maids, and free her from the curse. This plot comes with twists and turns, considering Nati only knows about curses from the things her grandmother taught her before her mother learned Nati was visiting her after it was forbidden. Nait buries all of the knowledge her grandmother taught her until she learns about Violeta, knowing there is something supernatural going on and decides she is going to fix it. Nati performs some very dangerous actions to try to get the curse lifted from Violeta, things she had never done before and things that could have more repercussions than just getting the curse lifted from Violeta.

The story is immersive, and I find the magic and rituals to be creative. With the limited space to tell this story, there are events that run in the current under the story that could have been more of a problem to Nati than they are. One of them is the racial unrest of Oakland in 1968, a place where there were riots after Bobby Hutton, a member of the Black Panther Party, was shot by the police. Violeta’s mother does mention this event, but there are not any real lasting effects in the house of the unease in the city. Add this to Nati being a gay woman, a sexual orientation that was still mostly underground at this time. At the time of the story, homosexuality is still in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and would be in manual until 1973. This means there are very few places she can be herself and the truth of her sexual orientation had to mostly be hidden behind closed doors at parties hosted in the houses of other gay women. These two issues create a very heavy social angle that is not explored much and does not add much danger. With the turns that the story does takes, with Nati growing closer and closer to Violeta, the danger that eventually comes is not as prominent as it could have been. Many of the actions Nati fears will happen disappear so far enough under the story that moment when she could be in danger are not explored. When the biggest threat does finally arrive, it is obviously the easiest threat to write out of the four or five that are possible. This makes the final climax feel a bit underwhelming. 

This does not mean that Muñeca is a book to be ignored. The story is interesting, and I had no problem reading through this is almost a day. Nati is a strong character, and even though the danger she is in does not manifest like it could have, we still want her to be successful in her mission, even when this mission turns from lifting the curse off of Violeta for her own personal gains into lifting the curse off of Violeta because of love. The story is great, but there could have been more problems than what occured.