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Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mar. 11th, 2017 10:12 pmSignal to Noise
2/5. In 2009, Meche goes home to Mexico City upon her father's death. In 1988, Meche and her friends discovered that she could do magic with her father's record collection.
Oh man, I so wish I could recommend this, because parts of it are really good – the portrayal of several different and contrasting kinds of poverty, for one. But the structure here so completely did not work, I feel like it should be an example in someone's class. The 1988 story is tense and mean; Meche's parents' marriage is imploding, and her friend group is splintering around teenage hormones and bad decisions, and the magic takes Meche to some pretty dark places. She does things – everyone does things – that are scary and awful (I actually kind of hoped at one point that the twist of this book would be that it was Meche's villain origin story). And the 2009 story moves in the opposite direction, to a slow kind of grace and forgiveness. Except that turn to hope at the end is structurally placed right along side the destruction at the end of the 1988 strand and it just . . . nope. It does not work. The two strands slide off each other, and the gulf of years in between is a blank. Could it have worked? Oh yeah. It could have been good, too. But it doesn't, and I was so frustrated by the structure that it dulled the enjoyment of so many of the small vignettes in this book, and the love of music.
2/5. In 2009, Meche goes home to Mexico City upon her father's death. In 1988, Meche and her friends discovered that she could do magic with her father's record collection.
Oh man, I so wish I could recommend this, because parts of it are really good – the portrayal of several different and contrasting kinds of poverty, for one. But the structure here so completely did not work, I feel like it should be an example in someone's class. The 1988 story is tense and mean; Meche's parents' marriage is imploding, and her friend group is splintering around teenage hormones and bad decisions, and the magic takes Meche to some pretty dark places. She does things – everyone does things – that are scary and awful (I actually kind of hoped at one point that the twist of this book would be that it was Meche's villain origin story). And the 2009 story moves in the opposite direction, to a slow kind of grace and forgiveness. Except that turn to hope at the end is structurally placed right along side the destruction at the end of the 1988 strand and it just . . . nope. It does not work. The two strands slide off each other, and the gulf of years in between is a blank. Could it have worked? Oh yeah. It could have been good, too. But it doesn't, and I was so frustrated by the structure that it dulled the enjoyment of so many of the small vignettes in this book, and the love of music.