2022 - Discussion Thread Q4 - Mexican Gothic & Still Life

I read Mexican Gothic prior to Q4, below is an edited version of the review I wrote for Goodreads at the time. Still Life isn't on my TBR, and I've always found Sarah Winman a bit of a hit-and-miss, so wasn't really keen to specifically buy it.

I generally love reading books which are set in places where I haven’t been, and this one did not disappoint in that respect. We are introduced in the first chapter to Mexican socialite Noemi, a clearly feisty girl who although I didn’t warm to immediately, I found her an interesting character and was looking forward to going on an adventure with her. She’s clearly not very impressed with her date for the evening, though I was left wondering why there was so much emphasis on Hugo at this stage, since he pretty much dropped out of the story from this point on .

Returning home after the party to be summoned to her father’s study, Noemi finds herself heading out to the countryside to respond to a distress letter from her cousin Catalina. Arriving at a beautifully described (and clearly slightly odd) mansion in the middle of nowhere, styled in a British way, the book gets creepier and creepier as nothing in the house is really as it seems. Catalina is sick, and everyone in her husband’s family all seem to be odd in different ways.

I wasn’t sure how much actual paranormal I was expecting from this one based on the blurb, or whether everything had a worldly (albeit likely to be sinister) explanation, so I really didn’t know where this one was going to go. I did enjoy the journey of finding out, for instance meeting the doctors and the herbal medicine woman with Noemi, although I thought we went around and around in circles for far too long before the reader is given a glimpse of information as to what is going on. That's of course in relative terms - it is a short book so we didn't go round for that long, it just felt that way in the wider context of the rest of the plot. I think my main gripe was that I felt that while the book a good length, the pages could have been used better, so to speak (see my thoughts in the next paragraph re: the ending).

Once things start to be revealed, the house of cards falls pretty quickly though and I was glued to the book for the final third. In the end I think it came off as a bit rushed, I would have liked the ending to have been drawn out for a few chapters more with some explanation instead of everyone vaguely normal just upping it and that was that. I ultimately gave 3.5* and rounded up, because it was an easy and overall enjoyable read, and I think the author achieved the spooks she was setting out for.