Review: It's the last nineteenth century in Mexico, and far from the problems plaguing the Yucatan peninsula, the young beauty Carlota lives an insular live on the isolated jungle estate of her father, a doctor making great strides in his medical research. She gets along graciously with all the inhabitants of her home, including her father's stern yet reliable majordomo, who runs things overall for her father, and helps as she can (when he'll let her) with her father's work with the hybrids, who live behind the great house in camps beyond the short stone wall. But Dr. Moreau is only able to do his work by the financing of the Lizaldes, who own the house and all its property, and have been funding Dr. Moreau's work for years now, growing ever more impatient to see the results the scientist had promised them. When the young son of the Lizalde family, Eduardo, comes to see his father's property and immediately takes a fancy to the vibrant, beautiful and enchanting Carlota, his advances begin a chain of events that will have Carlota questioning her father, his sanity, his work, the safe and peaceful life she's enjoyed for so long ... and the hybrids; not just their origins, their role in the grand scheme of things, but their very existence.
This is my third Silvia Moreno-Garcia read (after Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night, both favorites), and in the first two books I marveled in her ability to not only write in a variety of genres, but also to create characters that seem to leap flesh-and-blood off the page from the book's first paragraph. Her research is also always impeccable, messages about race, classism, feminism woven into the text poignantly. In this, her reimagining of the classic H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (and no, you don't have to have read that book to read/enjoy this one), all these traits sing as loudly, making it beautifully written ... but for me, the book came up slightly lacking in its heroine. In the previous novels I mentioned reading, her lead character in each started off mild-mannered, even subservient; a woman caught up in the constraints of her time and place in history, acting how women were "supposed to act" until the circumstances of the book's story made her take charge of both herself and her life - making both of these heroines in the two previous novels women of great strength by The End. Here, along with the pacing feeling a bit slow at times, for me Carlota remains more caterpillar than butterfly throughout, the events of the book certainly putting her through a lot ... but then tissue always appearing when the tears come again, Carlota remaining (overall) stronger in general yet somehow still secondary to the man/men in charge, who she turns to to make the decisions (the very end improves on this, thankfully). Still so, so many great things about this novel - still a recommended read - but between Carlota's arc of growth not feeling complete and the sometimes awkward pacing, it somehow makes the book feel a bit incomplete and awkward as well. 3/5 stars
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