The Return of the Sorceress

Since discovering Mexican Gothic I've run through all of Moreno-Garcia's catalog and, seeing this and anticipating her next book, it was a no-brainer. I'm not sure this one connected that well, though.

This one was in between. Technically a novella, it was short enough to be able to push through and told a simple, but effective story. Using genre tropes and her always on-point description, she's able to create a recognizable world within short order.

The lead character was where things suffered. This was a revenge story and the protagonist is bent on destroying her spurned lover. Everyone around her seems willing to help, but only because they're afraid of her. It creates a strange dynamic where you can understand why she's mad, but it doesn't make for enjoyable reading.

My biggest issue was with the ending. The ending redeems our characters, as endings tend to do, but our protagonist makes a decision that we, who spent the entire story understanding her motives and past through the narration, had no idea she was planning on doing. The ending was great, mind you. It redeemed the story for me, but it made the narration inconsistent, which was either a symptom of a novelist attempting to keep a story short by shearing off information or just intentionally omitting it for a surprise ending.