Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



i have friends in mexico and have visited a few times in the last few years and fell in love with this amazing country i hadn't previously known except via its art and literature. and here is a wonderful mexican-canadian author through which to gain further insight into the people, places, and myths of mexico. silvia moreno-garcia publishes as a genre author but to my mind, like eden robinson who also writes culturally grounded fantastic fiction, she could just as easily be published as a literary or "mainstream" author, as they call it only in genre. so, if you think you don't like genre, but enjoy fabulism or magic realism or metafiction or other more self-consciously literary genres, be aware you will love smg's style, her evocations of time and place, her feisty smart teenage heroines. (the last one i read was her first novel, the award-winning signal to noise, a beautiful story of young love, family dysfunction, a carefully etched mexico city and a little magic thrown in. just not too much, which is how i like it best, because to my mind, the people, the places, the history, the art and literature should supersede the fantastic elements, and not the other way around. it's true the protag's partner in crime is a god, but the way he is written, we see the human in him, and feel him being pulled. what would it be like to be fully human? isn't that a question we all ask ourselves ?

is this book ya or not? smg answers this question herself, and while, again like eden robinson, its protagonist is a teen, it's published and marketed as ya, but it could go either way. i have a couple of books that are published as adult that feature teens, and one that was marketed as ya that reads as a book for adults. to my my way of thinking, many of these books should be called what they in fact are: ya/adult crossover.



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Gods of Jade and Shadow