The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books 'Certain Dark Things' Takes The Vampire Story In A New DirectionĬasiopeia and Hun-Kamé travel from Casiopeia's small Yucatán town to the rural "big city" of Merída - and then on to Veracruz, Mexico City, and Baja California, acquiring Hun-Kamé's stolen magic (and body parts) as they go. The book comes into itself the moment Casiopeia is entangled with Hun-Kamé, and Moreno-Garcia takes her, and the reader, on a whirlwind tour of a 1920s Mexico vivid with jazz, the memories of revolution, and gods, demons, and magic which are both indigenous and foreign-born. Nevertheless, for the first few chapters of Gods of Jade and Shadow, the dominant tone is that of the basic fairy-tale retelling, and while Casiopeia's anger, frustration, and family entanglements are all well-drawn, they are nothing particularly special. So far, so fairy-tale - though the pleasure of seeing Mayan mythology underlying what at first seems to be a straightforward rendition of the Cinderella trope adds immediate interest to Moreno-Garcia's work. Hun-Kamé has been deposed from his throne by his twin brother, Vucub-Kamé, and Casiopeia finds herself first an unwilling and then an active participant in his quest to take revenge and reclaim his standing as the ruler of Xilbaba. She stumbles upon a locked chest containing (most of) the dismembered body of one of the Lords of Xilbalba, a Mayan god of death called Hun-Kamé, and frees him - becoming spiritually linked to him in the process.
The plot of the book is simple: A young woman, Casiopeia Tun, is suffering Cinderella-esque deprivation in the house of her grandfather, a wealthy rural landholder in the Yucatán. Novelist and NPR contributor Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new fantasy, Gods of Jade and Shadow, is at its witty, compelling, and merciless best when it is fully rooted in its setting, a perfectly organic combination of 1920s Jazz Age Mexico and the Mayan mythological text, the Popol Vuh. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Gods of Jade and Shadow Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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