storyorc's reviews
640 reviews

I hate to pit two bad bitches against each other but The Hacienda makes it to the finish line where Mexican Gothic fell ever so slightly short for me. It's got the sharp young lady (Beatriz, here) braving a den of wolves for her family; it's got the heavy, permeating sense of dread; it's got the secondary cast who always feel like they were talking about Beatriz the second before she entered the room. However, it also nails the romance and is a little scarier, especially those first times alone with the house!

Making the male lead, Andrés, a priest hiding a background in witchery was an inspired choice. He stands on his own apart from the romance as much as Beatriz and their conflicting loyalties - his with spirituality, hers with idealism vs practicality - make for nice parallels. Cañas also expertly tunes the heat of their romance. A lot is said between the lines ("

God has sent me the only incorruptible priest in Mexico" "I would not go so far as to say that.

"), and this is not one of those books where the heroine pauses in the middle of running from a monster to remark on the hero's back muscles. The horror and personal struggles remain the star of the show. For Andrés in particular, his split between Catholicism and witchcraft demands patience and grace from the reader and I was happy to see Cañas resist the temptation to flatten his arc into renouncing the Church. Realistic touches like, and especially the setting's politics and classism, help ground the many supernatural aspects story.

(There was a time near the beginning when I thought Juana, the new sister-in-law, would be the love interest though. Please, someone write the Hacienda/Bly Manor hybrid of my dreams.)

The prose also oozes gothic. From the "low, dark hills that curled around the valley like knuckles" to sun "pour[ing] down on [Andrés] like a saint in a painting" to the Hacienda "settling around me [a]s if I were but a fly on the hide of a giant beast that twitched in sleep", this book is thick with rich imagery. Pork soup is described at one point in a way that made me regret reading it after dinner. Shout out to this extremely metal passage too:

Occasionally a line will ring slightly too modern ("I didn't want protection; I wanted tools with which to protect myself") but for the most part, the progressive sensibilities are well-integrated and refreshing for anyone who finds the classic gothic works a little too stifling. 

Only read Family Furnishing (titular short). Read due to Munro's daughter coming out with her abuse story. Uncomfortably relatable flawed main character who wasn't particularly nice but was very believable.

The Atlas series continues to be frustrating but not without merit. For every eye-roll ("But its hot and I am le tired") and baffling moment ("He'd never understood British currency"), there's a beat of fun dialogue ("I might actually like you" "Don't worry, [i]t'll pass.") and a tug on the heartstrings ("Did you really think I could only love you if your hands were clean?").  As always, we see the shapes of intriguing ethical questions and interpersonal dynamics but their foundations are so wobbly that they often fizzle out into a paragraph of internal monologue that sounds pretty but says very little.

If you make it through those paragraphs, however, this final installment does deliver on the drama -

Parisa's mixed mourning of her husband, Dalton's Parisa doll,  Nico's heart-to-heart with Libby about finding each other in any universe and his subsequent death, Callum shooting Dalton, Libby almost shooting Callum, Tristan's dad actually shooting Callum

. I can't promise the emotions will be satisfying or even completely clear, but they will be heightened. And kinda horny.

What I really want to talk about is the acknowledgements. 

In the part of the book most people use to thank their cats, Blake sets fire to authorly mystique and tells us exactly what she's been trying to show us for three books: 
 

Reading this took the teeth out of my gripes with the series. The characters' extreme apathy is easier to bear knowing they're supposed to be avatars for how an unjust world makes you want to throw up your hands. I can make my peace with flimsy plot and worldbuilding with this confirmation that they were never meant to be more than vehicles for the Romance. Maybe all that style-over-substance rumination is like that not because of pretentiousness but a consequence of how hard it is to grapple with apathy and our own insignificance and come out with anything clear and meaningful.

The Atlas trilogy, weighed down by its ponderous flaws, is more of an imprint of the emotional highs and lows I was hoping for than the real things but that imprint is more intriguing and daring than many a more coherent story. I'm grateful Blake had the courage and discipline to try and personify some of the big, harrowing questions of our time in six of the worst classmates you could possibly imagine.

These hot idiots remain stuck in their frustrating ways but I can excuse it for the spectacle of 500-year-old fae lords hurling slut accusations at each other across a war room. Another heaping (too heaping, frankly) helping of exactly what the previous books offered - horny melodrama.
 
Do our heroes still spend negotiations flip-flopping between feigning boredom to show how cool they are and snarling self-righteously at the slightest insult to their mates? Yes. Is that hot bad boy about to drop a backstory that retroactively justifies all his misdeeds? Absolutely. Are these books still determined to bring wingplay to the masses? Are they ever! Do I still stop skimming whenever Lucien's name pops up? Maybe so.

After only a billion pages, we also get confirmation that faeries can be gay. LGBTQ rep rears its head twice; first, in a way that had me wary about bi stereotypes and then again in a 6-page jump scare near the end. It's definitely... there. 

Onto more exciting surprises: 

These books are what they are. If you've made it this far, you'll like Wings & Ruin too. God himself could not force me to read that Christmas special sequel though. Unless Lucien features heavily.