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The Hacienda
Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches...
In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.
But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.
When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark its doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano?
Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will help her.
Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness.
Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.
In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.
But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.
When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark its doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano?
Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will help her.
Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness.
Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published May 3, 2022
About the author
Isabel Cañas
8 books2,792 followersIsabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 6,742 reviews
January 3, 2023
Rebecca meets Mexican Gothic: a great combination of gothic house theme, historical fiction takes place after Mexican War of Independence, an impossible love story, powerful characters including terrifying horror house itself.
There are so many qualities in this book prevent you put it down, deserving your entire focus and energy!
Definitely one of the most brilliant, interesting, capturing reads I’ve recently had!
Beatriz: daughter of disgraced general, loses everything including father’s property, family’s reputation, rejecting to be reliant on her uncle’s charity and sour aunty’s goodwill, accepting her only choice that may give a proper wealthy life for herself and her mother: she accepts to be second wife of Don Rodolfo despite the rumors about suspicious death of his first wife. Because marrying with Don Rodolfo means she will have her own hacienda: San Isidro even though she has to live with eccentric and hostile sister in law.
But as soon as she moves to the hacienda, she realizes she’s trapped in a haunted place controlled by evil spirits. She has to take action before the house breaks her completely.
Beatriz’s path crosses with our other POV belongs to priest Andres, who has truly mysterious past, coming to the hacienda to perform exorcism. But we shockingly realize this mysterious priest is not we thought who he was.
I have to admit the haunted hacienda is the most interesting character of this book scared the living daylights out of me!
Overall: well written, perfectly blended: historical fiction- horror- Latin culture-Daphne Du Maurier’s classic earned my scary, jaw dropping, eccentric, spine tingling, one of the best 2022 reads stars!
Special thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for sharing this amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.
There are so many qualities in this book prevent you put it down, deserving your entire focus and energy!
Definitely one of the most brilliant, interesting, capturing reads I’ve recently had!
Beatriz: daughter of disgraced general, loses everything including father’s property, family’s reputation, rejecting to be reliant on her uncle’s charity and sour aunty’s goodwill, accepting her only choice that may give a proper wealthy life for herself and her mother: she accepts to be second wife of Don Rodolfo despite the rumors about suspicious death of his first wife. Because marrying with Don Rodolfo means she will have her own hacienda: San Isidro even though she has to live with eccentric and hostile sister in law.
But as soon as she moves to the hacienda, she realizes she’s trapped in a haunted place controlled by evil spirits. She has to take action before the house breaks her completely.
Beatriz’s path crosses with our other POV belongs to priest Andres, who has truly mysterious past, coming to the hacienda to perform exorcism. But we shockingly realize this mysterious priest is not we thought who he was.
I have to admit the haunted hacienda is the most interesting character of this book scared the living daylights out of me!
Overall: well written, perfectly blended: historical fiction- horror- Latin culture-Daphne Du Maurier’s classic earned my scary, jaw dropping, eccentric, spine tingling, one of the best 2022 reads stars!
Special thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for sharing this amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.
March 17, 2024
**4.5-stars rounded up**
After her father is killed in the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz and her mother are forced to move in with her mother's family who had previously disowned her.
They're cruel and haughty about Beatriz and her mother's now tenuous situation within the community. It's not good.
Therefore, when handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes to Beatriz, she jumps at his offer. This could be their opportunity to climb back up the social ladder.
Beatriz would be the lady of Solórzano's countryside estate and with that will come the security she's been craving. Many people marry for reasons other than love. It's the 1830's. How bad could it be anyway?
Unfortunately, after arriving at Hacienda San Isidro, Beatriz finds that it isn't quite what she expected. Still she remains optimistic. If she pours love into the large estate hopefully she'll be able to breathe some new life into it and then move her mother in as well.
Rodolfo swiftly returns to work in the capital, leaving Beatriz to fend for herself with just the staff and his abrasive sister, Juana, for company.
Under these circumstances, it doesn't take long for Beatriz to realize that there's something really off about this hacienda.
Beatriz begins hearing voices, having terribly vivid nightmares and constantly feels like she is being watched. She wouldn't consider herself a nervous person, but this goes beyond anxiety inducing.
Beatriz fears the hacienda is haunted and she suspects that perhaps the first Dona Solórzano is to blame. How did she die exactly? No one seems willing or able to give her a straight answer on that.
Pushed to her limits, Beatriz knows she needs to figure this out and rid the hacienda of what ails it before it's too late.
With this goal in mind, she turns to a young local priest, Padre Andrés, for help. Together the two set out to exorcise the malevolent presence from the hacienda for good.
Isabel Canas delivers heavy Gothic Horror vibes in this novel. The atmosphere is so strong. The descriptions of what Beatriz was experiencing were absolutely chilling. There were times I had difficulty reading it at night.
OMG and is this her debut full length novel!? Canas knocked it out of the park with her first swing!?
I'm seriously fangirling hard over here. Honestly, it has the exact vibe I was hoping for when I picked it up.
I actually never read the full synopsis, so Padre Andrés and the role he played in the story took me completely by surprise. I loved that element and his character in particular. Also, the dynamic between Andrés and Beatriz was built out really well.
I would consider this to be a slow burn, so I can see how some Readers may not vibe with that inital build. However, if you are willing to put in the time, it will pay off and it really doesn't take long before the spooky stuff begins.
I would definitely recommend this to Horror fans who enjoy a historical setting, as well as to anyone who loves gothic-feeling fiction, or haunted house tales.
Thank you so very much to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me with a copy to read and review.
I really enjoyed my time with this one and cannot wait to see what Canas serves up next!!!
After her father is killed in the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz and her mother are forced to move in with her mother's family who had previously disowned her.
They're cruel and haughty about Beatriz and her mother's now tenuous situation within the community. It's not good.
Therefore, when handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes to Beatriz, she jumps at his offer. This could be their opportunity to climb back up the social ladder.
Beatriz would be the lady of Solórzano's countryside estate and with that will come the security she's been craving. Many people marry for reasons other than love. It's the 1830's. How bad could it be anyway?
Unfortunately, after arriving at Hacienda San Isidro, Beatriz finds that it isn't quite what she expected. Still she remains optimistic. If she pours love into the large estate hopefully she'll be able to breathe some new life into it and then move her mother in as well.
Rodolfo swiftly returns to work in the capital, leaving Beatriz to fend for herself with just the staff and his abrasive sister, Juana, for company.
Under these circumstances, it doesn't take long for Beatriz to realize that there's something really off about this hacienda.
Beatriz begins hearing voices, having terribly vivid nightmares and constantly feels like she is being watched. She wouldn't consider herself a nervous person, but this goes beyond anxiety inducing.
Beatriz fears the hacienda is haunted and she suspects that perhaps the first Dona Solórzano is to blame. How did she die exactly? No one seems willing or able to give her a straight answer on that.
Pushed to her limits, Beatriz knows she needs to figure this out and rid the hacienda of what ails it before it's too late.
With this goal in mind, she turns to a young local priest, Padre Andrés, for help. Together the two set out to exorcise the malevolent presence from the hacienda for good.
Isabel Canas delivers heavy Gothic Horror vibes in this novel. The atmosphere is so strong. The descriptions of what Beatriz was experiencing were absolutely chilling. There were times I had difficulty reading it at night.
OMG and is this her debut full length novel!? Canas knocked it out of the park with her first swing!?
I'm seriously fangirling hard over here. Honestly, it has the exact vibe I was hoping for when I picked it up.
I actually never read the full synopsis, so Padre Andrés and the role he played in the story took me completely by surprise. I loved that element and his character in particular. Also, the dynamic between Andrés and Beatriz was built out really well.
I would consider this to be a slow burn, so I can see how some Readers may not vibe with that inital build. However, if you are willing to put in the time, it will pay off and it really doesn't take long before the spooky stuff begins.
I would definitely recommend this to Horror fans who enjoy a historical setting, as well as to anyone who loves gothic-feeling fiction, or haunted house tales.
Thank you so very much to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me with a copy to read and review.
I really enjoyed my time with this one and cannot wait to see what Canas serves up next!!!
May 3, 2022
When I'm asked by readers what books to read if they like my books, this book is the answer. Beautifully written, powerful, a gothic ghost story that tackles huge themes and scares the socks off you at the same time. A strong heroine, a terrifying house, and a hot priest. You truly could not ask for more in your ghost story. Highly recommended!
March 11, 2024
isabel cañas is the only horror author ever…
this book was haunting, eerie, suspenseful, and a little bit romantic. cañas perfectly blends all these things in a historical context. not only do i get a good story but also a fictional plot weaved into history. aka the ghost representing Mexican colonialism.
Beatriz’s and Andrés relationship was so 🥹😭🫠🩷melting. the way he so effortlessly protected her. didn’t gaslight her like everyone else. the way she trusted him with her safety. they fundamentally changed my brain chemistry 🫣
this part is kinda spoilery so be forewarned:
i NEED to know what was written in that letter and if they ended up finding their way back to each other. the romantic in me was shaking. honestly if i had more closure than what was written, this would’ve been 5 stars. nonetheless, i highly recommend :)
this book was haunting, eerie, suspenseful, and a little bit romantic. cañas perfectly blends all these things in a historical context. not only do i get a good story but also a fictional plot weaved into history. aka the ghost representing Mexican colonialism.
Beatriz’s and Andrés relationship was so 🥹😭🫠🩷melting. the way he so effortlessly protected her. didn’t gaslight her like everyone else. the way she trusted him with her safety. they fundamentally changed my brain chemistry 🫣
this part is kinda spoilery so be forewarned:
i NEED to know what was written in that letter and if they ended up finding their way back to each other. the romantic in me was shaking. honestly if i had more closure than what was written, this would’ve been 5 stars. nonetheless, i highly recommend :)
May 10, 2022
The Hacienda by Isabel Canas is a 2022 Berkley publication.
If you enjoy a good atmospheric tale of Gothic Horror, then you’ve come to the right place!
With a blurb like ‘Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca’ I was eagerly anticipating this one and I was not disappointed!!
After her father is executed during the Mexican War of Independence, and she loses her home, Beatriz grabs onto a golden opportunity by marrying Don Rodolpho Solórzano, a widower whose previous wife died under mysterious circumstances.
Determined to have a better life, and the security her marriage promises, Beatriz is eager to move onto Don’s countryside estate and begin making it her own. She is not met with warmth by Don’s sister, the staff….
Or the House….
When Beatriz begins to experience some frightening events, she realizes she needs help. To that end, she enlists a young priest named Padre Andres, who becomes her only trustworthy supporter. Beatriz comes to believe that if she and Padre are not successful in ridding the house of its evil she will die in the house, just as Don Rodolpho’s first wife did…
Wow! Paying homage to the Gothic Horror of old, while giving the genre a fresh spin, this story has everything you would want in a rip roaring fireside tale of horror, suspense, and forbidden love. I was riveted to the pages, gripped by the spine-tingling supernatural atmosphere, but was also drawn to the romance of the story, as well.
Some religious imagery and conflict were a little uncomfortable as the author mingles secular tendencies with the church, but it was an interesting representation of an internal conflict in all of us.
Overall, this is a superb representation of this genre. I’m duly impressed. I mainly read this book late at night and I must say that it gave me the shivers more than once and had me jumping at the slightest noise. If I have my information right, this is the first full length novel by this author, and she absolutely nailed it!!
If you enjoy a good atmospheric tale of Gothic Horror, then you’ve come to the right place!
With a blurb like ‘Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca’ I was eagerly anticipating this one and I was not disappointed!!
After her father is executed during the Mexican War of Independence, and she loses her home, Beatriz grabs onto a golden opportunity by marrying Don Rodolpho Solórzano, a widower whose previous wife died under mysterious circumstances.
Determined to have a better life, and the security her marriage promises, Beatriz is eager to move onto Don’s countryside estate and begin making it her own. She is not met with warmth by Don’s sister, the staff….
Or the House….
When Beatriz begins to experience some frightening events, she realizes she needs help. To that end, she enlists a young priest named Padre Andres, who becomes her only trustworthy supporter. Beatriz comes to believe that if she and Padre are not successful in ridding the house of its evil she will die in the house, just as Don Rodolpho’s first wife did…
Wow! Paying homage to the Gothic Horror of old, while giving the genre a fresh spin, this story has everything you would want in a rip roaring fireside tale of horror, suspense, and forbidden love. I was riveted to the pages, gripped by the spine-tingling supernatural atmosphere, but was also drawn to the romance of the story, as well.
Some religious imagery and conflict were a little uncomfortable as the author mingles secular tendencies with the church, but it was an interesting representation of an internal conflict in all of us.
Overall, this is a superb representation of this genre. I’m duly impressed. I mainly read this book late at night and I must say that it gave me the shivers more than once and had me jumping at the slightest noise. If I have my information right, this is the first full length novel by this author, and she absolutely nailed it!!
October 2, 2022
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THE HACIENDA has been on my to-read list ever since I learned of its existence. As someone who is a huge fan of old skool gothic novels, this sounded like it was going to be everything I loved about the genre, infused with Mexican history and culture.
Beatriz's father was killed as a traitor during the overthrowing of the Mexican government. After that, she and her mother were left at the mercy of distant relatives, who resented their presence and treated Beatriz cruelly for being too dark. When she meets Rodolfo and he proposes marriage, it seems like a dream come true: he has the fair good looks of the upper-class and runs an agave plantation that is used to make pulque. San Isidro is so massive that there is plenty of room to send for her mother and have the two of them live happily ever after.
But pretty soon it becomes obvious that a traditional ending is not in the cards. Beatriz sees and hears what appear to be apparitions and there is a darkness, a coldness, that runs through the house. Her new sister in law, Juana, does not appear to care for her, and there are terrible rumors about her husband, Rodolfo. The only one who can help her is a priest named Andres, but he has secrets as well. If Beatriz is unable to fix what is wrong with the hacienda, her life might be in terrible danger. But so might be everyone else's, too.
So this was really good. The writing was beautiful and spare and I thought the atmosphere was amazing. Cañas did a great job staying true to the classic gothic formula, and there were scenes in it that scared the shit out of me. I liked all the characters I was supposed to like and hated all the characters I was supposed to hate. The ending was fantastic, too. My only qualm was that the characterization was a little bland. I guess I was hoping for more nuance from some of the characters. Beatriz and Andres felt pretty interchangeable as narrators. It sure was great for a debut, though, and I honestly thought it was a lot better than MEXICAN GOTHIC (it's weird that they're being compared so much because they have totally different writing styles and HACIENDA runs circles around MG, in my opinion).
3 to 3.5 stars
June 21, 2021
for the last year i've been doing two things that are pretty new to me: reading romance, and watching horror. i've also been reading a ton of gothic fiction and trying to write a book about a spooky house rooted in local histories.
so when i tell you this book is up my alley, i mean it is PRECISELY up my alley. it puts all those things together and--crucially--adds a very hot priest. i loved it.
so when i tell you this book is up my alley, i mean it is PRECISELY up my alley. it puts all those things together and--crucially--adds a very hot priest. i loved it.
May 3, 2022
I loved this book so much I picked it for the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club. A supernatural gothic tale that looks at love, class, race, Mexican history and folklore, religion, power...SO MUCH TO PICK APART while also being a quick read you won't want to put down. I read it in a night and it was worth the book hangover I had the next morning.
April 26, 2022
Isabel Canas’ debut novel is a supernatural suspense story that can also be classified as horror. Largely set in a remote house in Mexico after the Mexican War of Independence from Spain, the author packs it with atmosphere, history, life, and memorable characters. Most of the book is set in 1823 with a few flashbacks.
The execution of Beatriz’s father and the loss of their home force Beatriz and her mother to live with relatives that treat them badly. When Don Rodolfo Eligio Solorzano proposes, Beatriz is willing to ignore the rumors about his first wife in order to have her own home again. However, the house is not the haven she expected. A poorly maintained house lacking furnishings and a housekeeper and sister-in-law that seem to hate her on site are only the beginning. Visions, voices, and red eyes looking at add to her nightmare. Something is wrong and she needs help. Turning to the witch turned priest Padre Andres, she hopes to find out what is wrong and fix it. Will she survive?
Beatriz is generally a strong character intent on survival and a new life. The horrors she faces will test her and her resilience. Rodolfo appears to be solid, reliable, and confident. However, rumors still follow him. Padre Andres has two ways of life battling for supremacy within him. The secondary characters have varying degrees of depth that is applicable for their roles in this story line.
The writing is fluid, flows well, and is very descriptive. A twisty and absorbing plot kept the pages turning. Building the tension and terror, the author expertly brings the young bride’s fears to life. Weaving love, survival, family, racism, socioeconomics, revenge, secrets, colonialism, religion, and folk beliefs into the story kept this reader on tenterhooks.
Overall, this was a moving, engrossing, compelling, and memorable novel with some pivotal stressful and emotional times. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.
Berkley Publishing Group and Isabel Canas provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. This is my honest review. Opinions are mine alone and are not biased in any way. Publication date is currently set for May 3, 2022.
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Review to be posted approximately April 26, 2022, per publisher guidelines.
The execution of Beatriz’s father and the loss of their home force Beatriz and her mother to live with relatives that treat them badly. When Don Rodolfo Eligio Solorzano proposes, Beatriz is willing to ignore the rumors about his first wife in order to have her own home again. However, the house is not the haven she expected. A poorly maintained house lacking furnishings and a housekeeper and sister-in-law that seem to hate her on site are only the beginning. Visions, voices, and red eyes looking at add to her nightmare. Something is wrong and she needs help. Turning to the witch turned priest Padre Andres, she hopes to find out what is wrong and fix it. Will she survive?
Beatriz is generally a strong character intent on survival and a new life. The horrors she faces will test her and her resilience. Rodolfo appears to be solid, reliable, and confident. However, rumors still follow him. Padre Andres has two ways of life battling for supremacy within him. The secondary characters have varying degrees of depth that is applicable for their roles in this story line.
The writing is fluid, flows well, and is very descriptive. A twisty and absorbing plot kept the pages turning. Building the tension and terror, the author expertly brings the young bride’s fears to life. Weaving love, survival, family, racism, socioeconomics, revenge, secrets, colonialism, religion, and folk beliefs into the story kept this reader on tenterhooks.
Overall, this was a moving, engrossing, compelling, and memorable novel with some pivotal stressful and emotional times. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.
Berkley Publishing Group and Isabel Canas provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. This is my honest review. Opinions are mine alone and are not biased in any way. Publication date is currently set for May 3, 2022.
------------------------------------
Review to be posted approximately April 26, 2022, per publisher guidelines.
October 10, 2022
Meh.
A very underwhelming combo of Rebecca and Mexican Gothic.
The descriptions of day to day life on the hacienda and the oppression of the Mestizos were interesting, but all the major plot points were too predictable.
The only unpredictable character was the villain who made crazy nonsensical decisions that left me with a ton of questions. Like who climbs to the roof of a multilevel house to set it on fire? What exactly was their exit strategy?
This is a debut novel so I'll give it three stars, but this is not a book I would recommend for anyone looking for a new story.
A very underwhelming combo of Rebecca and Mexican Gothic.
The descriptions of day to day life on the hacienda and the oppression of the Mestizos were interesting, but all the major plot points were too predictable.
The only unpredictable character was the villain who made crazy nonsensical decisions that left me with a ton of questions. Like who climbs to the roof of a multilevel house to set it on fire? What exactly was their exit strategy?
This is a debut novel so I'll give it three stars, but this is not a book I would recommend for anyone looking for a new story.
August 25, 2022
I don’t know y’all! I wasn’t in the mood. So part of me doesn’t want to rate this at all. But the other part says that I have opinions even still.
I loved how present and intense the magic and haunting elements were. They were pussy-footing around. It was straight up spells and witchcraft. We love to see it.
But it wasn’t my type of engaging. It’s a slower build. If you loved Mexican Gothic then this is the read for you. It’s more thrilling than that book but still on that slow gothic horror vibe.
Also the romance??? I was uncomfy. If it was a forbidden trope I woulda been down. But as it was I was just a little unsettled.
The ending was such a disappointment for me. I understand that it is realistic and most likely what would happen in real life. But we’re talking ghosts and spells and hauntings and crazy family drama. I don’t want real life endings. I want ✨DRAMA✨
So I’d say this is a good book. But I’m not the target audience.
I loved how present and intense the magic and haunting elements were. They were pussy-footing around. It was straight up spells and witchcraft. We love to see it.
But it wasn’t my type of engaging. It’s a slower build. If you loved Mexican Gothic then this is the read for you. It’s more thrilling than that book but still on that slow gothic horror vibe.
Also the romance??? I was uncomfy. If it was a forbidden trope I woulda been down. But as it was I was just a little unsettled.
The ending was such a disappointment for me. I understand that it is realistic and most likely what would happen in real life. But we’re talking ghosts and spells and hauntings and crazy family drama. I don’t want real life endings. I want ✨DRAMA✨
So I’d say this is a good book. But I’m not the target audience.
January 15, 2024
4/5 ⭐
Feel free to come at me because I'm about to make a big statement here, but I feel like everyone who picks up this book or adds it to the reading list does that mostly because of how gorgeous the cover is.
And yes, the reason why I picked this book was that I loved the cover, deal with it!
Plus, I thought it was the perfect read for the spooky season, I mean horror-ish gothic historical fiction that's seemingly a short read? Yes, sign me up, we're doing this!
Even though it's set almost 100 years apart from the plot of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, it had similar elements and similar vibes; given the fact that I found that book quite peculiar but ended up loving it, I thought it would be the case for this one too, them both sharing a style being a good enough reason for me.
I did enjoy The Hacienda even though not as much as Mexican Gothic but I'll still think of it as a good enough recommendation of the genre!
I don't know why, but every time I'm reading a Mexican history-inspired gothic/horror novel, I automatically have in mind this image of the house Courage the Cowardly Dog lived in together with Muriel and Eustace in that weird cartoon I'm sure the majority of us watched at some point. It seriously gives off the same kind of vibe!
Honestly, this has been a good read, but even so, I'll have to say, at some point, it dragged a bit too much for my liking. However, there was a constant kind of suspense that was present for the whole narrative act that somehow managed to maintain some sort of pressure on the story as you went on.
Can't say I liked the characters in particular, the prospect of two narrative lines interchanging between chapters is a bit tiring and as well as you want to feel something for certain characters, you can't really like them fully because of two reasons: 1) it's a horror book so the characters are mostly supposed to be scary and/or annoying and 2) when the narrative is in the first person singular, you'd expect more introspection but that introspection is a gamble most of the time, it could be the best thing about your story or the worst.
Feel free to come at me because I'm about to make a big statement here, but I feel like everyone who picks up this book or adds it to the reading list does that mostly because of how gorgeous the cover is.
And yes, the reason why I picked this book was that I loved the cover, deal with it!
Plus, I thought it was the perfect read for the spooky season, I mean horror-ish gothic historical fiction that's seemingly a short read? Yes, sign me up, we're doing this!
Even though it's set almost 100 years apart from the plot of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, it had similar elements and similar vibes; given the fact that I found that book quite peculiar but ended up loving it, I thought it would be the case for this one too, them both sharing a style being a good enough reason for me.
I did enjoy The Hacienda even though not as much as Mexican Gothic but I'll still think of it as a good enough recommendation of the genre!
I don't know why, but every time I'm reading a Mexican history-inspired gothic/horror novel, I automatically have in mind this image of the house Courage the Cowardly Dog lived in together with Muriel and Eustace in that weird cartoon I'm sure the majority of us watched at some point. It seriously gives off the same kind of vibe!
Honestly, this has been a good read, but even so, I'll have to say, at some point, it dragged a bit too much for my liking. However, there was a constant kind of suspense that was present for the whole narrative act that somehow managed to maintain some sort of pressure on the story as you went on.
Can't say I liked the characters in particular, the prospect of two narrative lines interchanging between chapters is a bit tiring and as well as you want to feel something for certain characters, you can't really like them fully because of two reasons: 1) it's a horror book so the characters are mostly supposed to be scary and/or annoying and 2) when the narrative is in the first person singular, you'd expect more introspection but that introspection is a gamble most of the time, it could be the best thing about your story or the worst.
November 11, 2022
the hacienda tells the story of beatriz, whose mestizo father sided with the insurgency during the mexican revolutionary war. at the end of the war, he’s branded a traiter and beatriz and her criollo mother must go live with her aunt, the only family who is still on speaking terms with the two of them. destitute and desperate to get the life she had before back (one presumes) she marries rodolfo solorzano, a criollo plantation owner and is whisked away to his home in the countryside. the marketing for this book has compared it to both daphne du maurier’s rebecca and silvia moreno-garcia’s mexican gothic. while i haven’t read the latter, i have just finished the former and i will say making this comparison has done a huge disservice to the book and author, neither of which can match du maurier for character study or, shall we say, complete derangement.
the problems with isabel cañas’s the hacienda fall under two broad categories: first, its author does not understand the genre she purports to be writing in and following that, the book cannot be said to be a novel of gothic horror or gothic romance. the second, which exacerbates the first by a distressing degree, is that the craft is unformed. the character portraits, the land which means so much to the plot of this book, the house after which the book is named: these are all at best extraordinarily faded sketches that simply don’t and really can’t make any lasting impression on the reader.
i will not pretend to give a definitive definition for what the gothic is. its a genre thats been around as a distinct category since the 18th-century at least, has as many branches as there are trees, and has spawned many more in literary communities far outside its origin. but i do think i can speak to the particular branch that cañas believes herself in conversation with, given the interviews she’s given, the marketing of the novel, and the substance of the book. gothic romance is distinguished by its (often very young) female heroines, their pursuit of true love, their naivete in the face of extraordinary (sometimes supernatural, sometimes not) circumstances, and the rapid maturation forced on them by these circumstances. often times the threat against them and their virtue is a much older man, sinister, evil, sometimes a priest, sometimes a close relative (incest runs rampant through classic gothic romance). because so often their virtue is at stake, a young woman’s sexuality is the crux of these plots: what she wants, what she should want, what she is enticed to want by the devil. these novels and this genre is also inextricable from the religious landscape in which they were produced and i think it is especially relevant to the hacienda that by the time this genre had concretized england was largely protestant and the devilish, sinister, and sexually lascivious characters were often catholic. and that is all to say nothing of the gothic mansion for which i think the genre is most widely known. the ancient house whose doors and shutters whip open and shut, whose malignance is driven by an unnamed menace.
i think on some level cañas understands all this because the trapping of these things are all there. but she either doesn’t have the patience or the skill to pull it off. our main character beatriz is approaching twenty. she has, by her own admission, never been married, never kissed, and is a virgin. she is already incredibly world-weary, given that her father has been arrested and executed for treason, and she cooks up an idea to secure a marriage that will grant her wealth and security. this is, to my mind, a great idea to invert the traditional plot. the seductress now is not the villain, is not the temptation for our naive heroine, but the heroine herself! here is the modern critique in an old genre! it’s not, dear reader. there is no seduction. we spend almost no time with rodolfo, her husband, at all. their courtship is not even overtly referenced--we just get a line about how she pastes on her brightest smile and reels him in. i beg of the author: how? if she’s essentially social kryptonite because of her father, and this is amplified by her status as a mestizo (which is, in her case, visible in her material body) how did she convince him that she was worth it? and if she did not have to convince him but he took her for some alternate reason, what about her was worth it? the absence of her seduction of rodolfo points to a broader issue in this novel: there is no sense of a body.
before i read this book i read rebecca and brandon taylor’s great essay ‘on character vapor’. i highly recommend both, but to this point, taylor’s essay is especially relevant in that he makes an argument for the presence of the physical, the material, as it is connected to the psychological. i don’t know that he thought his essay would be used in a close reading of the presence (or absence) of a sexual body in a modern gothic romance but here we are. we have no sense of beatriz’s body, no sense of how desire thrums through it, or her revulsion for rodolfo, or the strange, awful line of perversity and desire she must walk to seduce him. i don’t even know what clothes she enjoys, what joy in luxury she takes having finally freed herself from her aunt’s kitchen and into the master’s bedroom of a hacienda. there is a line early in the novel where she says that rodolfo’s touch never moved her, so by this time they have certainly slept together. but she seems to have no awareness of her body and indeed no awareness of rodolfo’s either. she is a new bride and it does not distress her to lie with someone she finds unappealing.
now, you may say, ‘it seems that you really just want the sensationalism of her distress and to be a voyeur to her suffering.’ listen, on the one hand: yes! this is the sensationalist genre. it is meant to be a heady, overwhelming sensory nightmare until it isn’t! that is one hundred percent a bedrock of the gothic! but what is far more important than that is: rodolfo is a menacing male lead. he is not the love interest. he is revealed to be a rapist, who terrorizes the women who work at the hacienda, who rapes them with regularity. beatriz doesn’t have to know this, she doesn’t even have to sense this. but then, this is not the genre that she should be in. a menacing man should be menacing. rodolfo is not. rodolfo is gone for most of the book and only returns to be killed by his younger, bastard sister. (a plot twist i dread returning to later for it made my mind blank in sheer rage.)
the absence of the material pervades the whole book. i don’t know what the grounds of the hacienda look like. i barely know what the green parlor room looks like. beatriz takes no interest in her environment and the author doesn’t believe that, in a gothic romance, her environment should in any way be connected by her psychology. beatriz feels cold, she hears whispers, she picks out blue silks. the house creaks and moans. but i don’t know what her bedroom looks like, what clothes she likes to wear, what the fabrics feel like on her skin, the relief at not being touched by rodolfo and so on. and because beatriz’s psychology is so forcefully disembodied, when she meets andres, the priest-witch, their romance is…a thing they profess to but does not actually exist on page.
beatriz doesn’t seem like a married woman, she takes advantage of none of the benefits of being the mistress of a hacienda. she spends most of the novel sobbing, sleepless, in her bedroom, surrounded by incense bowers burning copal. she doesn’t even have a ladies maid. every time she dressed on her own i was…confused, to say the least. and i think what is equally distressing is that the novel could bear this if not for the manner in which it totally and completely fails at horror. there is no build up. we have no sense of disrupted normalcy. the house turns on her immediately and immediately she understands that she is in danger. and it’s like this with every plot point. there was a sense, as i was reading, that the book only had pages because books required it, and the pages required sentences and the sentences required words. if the author could have i suspect she would have pasted several pinterest images together and bound them as a manuscript. even if your only reference to the gothic was the 2015 movie crimson peak (fine, unwilling to commit, beautiful costuming) it lingers on the things that matter: thomas’s seduction of edith, the strangeness of crimson peak, her slow decline into sickness as lucille begins to poison her. the hacienda cannot pause for a single moment on anything. its the novel equivalent of a flipbook, where you are simply watching the horse run in place until suddenly it clears a hurdle.
and then there is andres. oh andres. listen, i know i’m a lesbian, but i still must ask: why is a man narrating at all in a gothic romance novel? a novel ostensibly rooted in the tradition of, if not offering critique of the patriarchy, then at least offering us an emotionally honest truth of the terrors of being a woman under patriarchy. why does a man in a novel a person wrote (so it didn’t ‘just happen that way’) occupying a position traditionally held by a woman in a genre traditionally about women?
andres represents many of the problems of the novel. he is out of place in a gothic romance (though not necessarily a gothic horror), his history is poorly drawn (i still don’t understand what necessarily is the difference between the magic he inherits from his titi and the magic he inherits from his spaniard family), he has no material imprint (every time i remember he wears a habit is a jump scare), and his motivations simply do not hold water. but perhaps what stands out the most to me about him is this: the legacy of racial terror that lives in his blood, and the conflict between two types of religious practice, never came to life. a novel that was invested in the gothic of colonial trauma would have needed significantly more work, would have needed a much higher investment in what it meant to be devout or to be made to be devout in the wake of the spanish inquisition. i don’t doubt that andres could find solace in the christian god, because faith is a strange thing we can’t always account for. but he also understands that catholicism is actively hunting people like him, that he has gone to hide among his would be oppressors. and yet: there is never any conflict about which god he prays to. we get an evil, inquisition-leaning padre, but he is balanced with a much older padre who knew andres when he was young, and so the church is defanged. beatriz expresses ambivalence to the church, as her father names them as money hungry and overly conservative, but these denouncements never hold any weight. the book has no sense of mysticism, no sense of spirituality, no sense of awe. i don’t know what andres believes in besides jesus christ, where his titi’s powers come from, or his relationship to indigenous culture. like listen, i am a religious minority who is firmly in the ‘fuck the church’ camp. i also am from a country whose ancestors were colonized by the muslims, a religion i now willfully practice as an adult. this stuff is complicated. but the book doesn’t think so. it simply says that andres found solace in prayer and in following a map provided to him by the church, which sounds an awful lot like catholic missionary propaganda, that neither he nor anyone else in the book ever questions. and you don’t have to question it--unless of course, this is a tension deliberately and repeatedly brought up by one of your narrators.
this kind of writing also undermines the racial aspects of this book. beatriz is the daughter of a mestizo and has inherited his coloring. andres is, i think, half spaniard by his father, and half indigenous by his mother. these are brought up in several ways: when beatriz laments the way her aunt treats her because she is darker, as a defense to andres when she talks about marrying rodolfo (he doesn’t understand how hard it is for a girl of her coloring), and flatly in regard to andres relationship to the hacienda and to the land. but because we don’t really spend time anywhere with anyone, we linger no where, the way this materially impacts them doesn’t stick. is she rodolfo’s exotic bride or is she actually criolla-passing if she stays out of the sun? do the other dons and doñas of the haciendas look down on her? do people look at her hair first in surprise? is she aware of the way men react to her because of her heritage? do the priests believe she needs to be civilized and so take a particular tone with her? there are a thousand small ways a racialized existence in the upper echelons of society affect your life--we see none of them from beatriz except as defiant pronouncements about how because of this, she must do things other girls would not. and to be frank, man, i don’t really believe her.
there are three possible stories in this novel. the first is the story of a keen-eyed girl who chooses her husband on purpose, figures out her house is haunted almost immediately, and seeks help. the second is the story of a younger, bastard sister, who committed an unspeakable act to secure an inheritance (that the reader is never entirely clear on), and who is, in the tradition of some of my favorite gothic stories, summarily dragged off to hell for committing this act. the third is the story of racial and religious trauma and terrorism absorbed by the land and the hacienda, and the man able to bridge that conflict to satisfy the restless spirits of his ancestors. none of these are fully committed to, but the second one is truly the most insulting nestled in this book.
we have not talked about juana, rodolfo’s younger sister. when beatriz and rodolfo arrive at the hacienda, she is greeted by the staff, and then juana, his brash younger sister (who, as others have said, is truly the biggest case of lesbian bait i’ve seen in a novel in a minute). the servants, and most especially ana luis (the house keeper), all look up to and respect her. there is a moment where juana seems to like beatriz too, but when beatriz runs screaming to her about a body in the wall, she turns on her and they are firmly set as enemies. this is because: juana bricked a body into the wall. why did she do that? don’t worry. we’ll get there. for the rest of the book, juana is mostly absent, present only in the sense that beatriz resents her, and resents the way she has set ana luisa against her, once in an andres chapter, and then near the end when she gets belligerently drunk at a dinner party. at the end of this dinner party beatriz and andres overhear rodolfo calling her a bastard, threatening to have her evicted from the property if she doesn’t marry, and then strikes her. the next morning juana has murdered rodolfo, and the book careens towards its end where we learn that she also killed rodolfo’s first wife, the malignant presence haunting the house. its implied that juana did this because doña catalina (the first wife) threatened juana’s rule of the house.
ostensibly, juana is present throughout the novel, but her appearance as the actual villain feels like a third act deus ex machina, that satisfies neither the expectations of the genre nor the expectations set by the book. the book’s investments (such as they can be, given everything) lie in two camps: first, beatriz’s terror, a result of the house’s seemingly baseless fixation on her given her ambivalence to her husband and her disconnect from the land and second, the abuse of the staff by rodolfo and catalina. juana doesn’t figure into it at all. beatriz is entirely uninterested in running the actual plantation of the hacienda (a thing both she and the book avoid almost religiously in a way i found both insane and comical), and juana by her own admission has no interest in the house. and because, as with most things in this novel, we spend almost no time with juana we get no sense of her relationship to anything. not her relationship to ana luisa, not her relationship to paloma, not her relationship to beatriz, or to the house, or to catalina. we don’t even know that she wants to run the hacienda until the very end. we don’t know rodolfo and catalina’s relationship to one another, or their shared relationship with juana, or juana’s relationship to the servants. we don’t know why she wants the hacienda and doesn’t want to marry. and she’s deeply representative of the things the novel purports to be interested in but spends no time with. if there is some sinister legacy of the solorzano’s beyond their abuse of servants (which the book doesn’t really care about beyond flavoring for the horror) we aren’t told. that juana is not just a bastard child, but a bastard child of rodolfo’s mother is prime gothic material--the subversion of expectation for women’s behavior under patriarchy is bone and blood deep and manifests not only in her strained relationship with her brother, but in the unwomanlike way she behaves (again, i say, wailing, lesbian bait!). she is neither menacing nor sexual, and because she is absent we lose our only tangible collection to catalina, who menaces beatriz though no one really knows why. and then, even when catalina’s spirit is loosed through an accident she doesn’t pursue juana, she finds ana luisa.
i said in the beginning of this review that the book’s comparison to rebecca has done tremendous damage to the book. this is, in part, because the author does not actually understand what lies at the core of the haunting of the second mrs de winter. the narrator arrives at manderly young, inexperienced in love, sex, and money, of a lower economic class than her husband and his peers, knowing only that she loves maxim de winter and thinking this will be enough. she is haunted by rebecca not because manderly supernaturally rejects her but because she stands on the cusp of womanhood, haunted by its very specific shape, not knowing how to fit into it. the servants are similarly haunted, living inside rebecca’s ghost, her laugh, her fashionable clothing, her charisma and magnetism, all things the second mrs de winter cannot hope to embody. on the solorzano hacienda no one seems to remember catalina. no one talks of how she arranged things, of how she loved them, of how she made them laugh. none of her peers visit beatriz and so her mark on society is largely left unexplored. beatriz is haunted by a crazed ghost with aimless rage--she is collateral because the ghost, and so in many ways the story, does not care for her at all. [continued in comments]
the problems with isabel cañas’s the hacienda fall under two broad categories: first, its author does not understand the genre she purports to be writing in and following that, the book cannot be said to be a novel of gothic horror or gothic romance. the second, which exacerbates the first by a distressing degree, is that the craft is unformed. the character portraits, the land which means so much to the plot of this book, the house after which the book is named: these are all at best extraordinarily faded sketches that simply don’t and really can’t make any lasting impression on the reader.
i will not pretend to give a definitive definition for what the gothic is. its a genre thats been around as a distinct category since the 18th-century at least, has as many branches as there are trees, and has spawned many more in literary communities far outside its origin. but i do think i can speak to the particular branch that cañas believes herself in conversation with, given the interviews she’s given, the marketing of the novel, and the substance of the book. gothic romance is distinguished by its (often very young) female heroines, their pursuit of true love, their naivete in the face of extraordinary (sometimes supernatural, sometimes not) circumstances, and the rapid maturation forced on them by these circumstances. often times the threat against them and their virtue is a much older man, sinister, evil, sometimes a priest, sometimes a close relative (incest runs rampant through classic gothic romance). because so often their virtue is at stake, a young woman’s sexuality is the crux of these plots: what she wants, what she should want, what she is enticed to want by the devil. these novels and this genre is also inextricable from the religious landscape in which they were produced and i think it is especially relevant to the hacienda that by the time this genre had concretized england was largely protestant and the devilish, sinister, and sexually lascivious characters were often catholic. and that is all to say nothing of the gothic mansion for which i think the genre is most widely known. the ancient house whose doors and shutters whip open and shut, whose malignance is driven by an unnamed menace.
i think on some level cañas understands all this because the trapping of these things are all there. but she either doesn’t have the patience or the skill to pull it off. our main character beatriz is approaching twenty. she has, by her own admission, never been married, never kissed, and is a virgin. she is already incredibly world-weary, given that her father has been arrested and executed for treason, and she cooks up an idea to secure a marriage that will grant her wealth and security. this is, to my mind, a great idea to invert the traditional plot. the seductress now is not the villain, is not the temptation for our naive heroine, but the heroine herself! here is the modern critique in an old genre! it’s not, dear reader. there is no seduction. we spend almost no time with rodolfo, her husband, at all. their courtship is not even overtly referenced--we just get a line about how she pastes on her brightest smile and reels him in. i beg of the author: how? if she’s essentially social kryptonite because of her father, and this is amplified by her status as a mestizo (which is, in her case, visible in her material body) how did she convince him that she was worth it? and if she did not have to convince him but he took her for some alternate reason, what about her was worth it? the absence of her seduction of rodolfo points to a broader issue in this novel: there is no sense of a body.
before i read this book i read rebecca and brandon taylor’s great essay ‘on character vapor’. i highly recommend both, but to this point, taylor’s essay is especially relevant in that he makes an argument for the presence of the physical, the material, as it is connected to the psychological. i don’t know that he thought his essay would be used in a close reading of the presence (or absence) of a sexual body in a modern gothic romance but here we are. we have no sense of beatriz’s body, no sense of how desire thrums through it, or her revulsion for rodolfo, or the strange, awful line of perversity and desire she must walk to seduce him. i don’t even know what clothes she enjoys, what joy in luxury she takes having finally freed herself from her aunt’s kitchen and into the master’s bedroom of a hacienda. there is a line early in the novel where she says that rodolfo’s touch never moved her, so by this time they have certainly slept together. but she seems to have no awareness of her body and indeed no awareness of rodolfo’s either. she is a new bride and it does not distress her to lie with someone she finds unappealing.
now, you may say, ‘it seems that you really just want the sensationalism of her distress and to be a voyeur to her suffering.’ listen, on the one hand: yes! this is the sensationalist genre. it is meant to be a heady, overwhelming sensory nightmare until it isn’t! that is one hundred percent a bedrock of the gothic! but what is far more important than that is: rodolfo is a menacing male lead. he is not the love interest. he is revealed to be a rapist, who terrorizes the women who work at the hacienda, who rapes them with regularity. beatriz doesn’t have to know this, she doesn’t even have to sense this. but then, this is not the genre that she should be in. a menacing man should be menacing. rodolfo is not. rodolfo is gone for most of the book and only returns to be killed by his younger, bastard sister. (a plot twist i dread returning to later for it made my mind blank in sheer rage.)
the absence of the material pervades the whole book. i don’t know what the grounds of the hacienda look like. i barely know what the green parlor room looks like. beatriz takes no interest in her environment and the author doesn’t believe that, in a gothic romance, her environment should in any way be connected by her psychology. beatriz feels cold, she hears whispers, she picks out blue silks. the house creaks and moans. but i don’t know what her bedroom looks like, what clothes she likes to wear, what the fabrics feel like on her skin, the relief at not being touched by rodolfo and so on. and because beatriz’s psychology is so forcefully disembodied, when she meets andres, the priest-witch, their romance is…a thing they profess to but does not actually exist on page.
beatriz doesn’t seem like a married woman, she takes advantage of none of the benefits of being the mistress of a hacienda. she spends most of the novel sobbing, sleepless, in her bedroom, surrounded by incense bowers burning copal. she doesn’t even have a ladies maid. every time she dressed on her own i was…confused, to say the least. and i think what is equally distressing is that the novel could bear this if not for the manner in which it totally and completely fails at horror. there is no build up. we have no sense of disrupted normalcy. the house turns on her immediately and immediately she understands that she is in danger. and it’s like this with every plot point. there was a sense, as i was reading, that the book only had pages because books required it, and the pages required sentences and the sentences required words. if the author could have i suspect she would have pasted several pinterest images together and bound them as a manuscript. even if your only reference to the gothic was the 2015 movie crimson peak (fine, unwilling to commit, beautiful costuming) it lingers on the things that matter: thomas’s seduction of edith, the strangeness of crimson peak, her slow decline into sickness as lucille begins to poison her. the hacienda cannot pause for a single moment on anything. its the novel equivalent of a flipbook, where you are simply watching the horse run in place until suddenly it clears a hurdle.
and then there is andres. oh andres. listen, i know i’m a lesbian, but i still must ask: why is a man narrating at all in a gothic romance novel? a novel ostensibly rooted in the tradition of, if not offering critique of the patriarchy, then at least offering us an emotionally honest truth of the terrors of being a woman under patriarchy. why does a man in a novel a person wrote (so it didn’t ‘just happen that way’) occupying a position traditionally held by a woman in a genre traditionally about women?
andres represents many of the problems of the novel. he is out of place in a gothic romance (though not necessarily a gothic horror), his history is poorly drawn (i still don’t understand what necessarily is the difference between the magic he inherits from his titi and the magic he inherits from his spaniard family), he has no material imprint (every time i remember he wears a habit is a jump scare), and his motivations simply do not hold water. but perhaps what stands out the most to me about him is this: the legacy of racial terror that lives in his blood, and the conflict between two types of religious practice, never came to life. a novel that was invested in the gothic of colonial trauma would have needed significantly more work, would have needed a much higher investment in what it meant to be devout or to be made to be devout in the wake of the spanish inquisition. i don’t doubt that andres could find solace in the christian god, because faith is a strange thing we can’t always account for. but he also understands that catholicism is actively hunting people like him, that he has gone to hide among his would be oppressors. and yet: there is never any conflict about which god he prays to. we get an evil, inquisition-leaning padre, but he is balanced with a much older padre who knew andres when he was young, and so the church is defanged. beatriz expresses ambivalence to the church, as her father names them as money hungry and overly conservative, but these denouncements never hold any weight. the book has no sense of mysticism, no sense of spirituality, no sense of awe. i don’t know what andres believes in besides jesus christ, where his titi’s powers come from, or his relationship to indigenous culture. like listen, i am a religious minority who is firmly in the ‘fuck the church’ camp. i also am from a country whose ancestors were colonized by the muslims, a religion i now willfully practice as an adult. this stuff is complicated. but the book doesn’t think so. it simply says that andres found solace in prayer and in following a map provided to him by the church, which sounds an awful lot like catholic missionary propaganda, that neither he nor anyone else in the book ever questions. and you don’t have to question it--unless of course, this is a tension deliberately and repeatedly brought up by one of your narrators.
this kind of writing also undermines the racial aspects of this book. beatriz is the daughter of a mestizo and has inherited his coloring. andres is, i think, half spaniard by his father, and half indigenous by his mother. these are brought up in several ways: when beatriz laments the way her aunt treats her because she is darker, as a defense to andres when she talks about marrying rodolfo (he doesn’t understand how hard it is for a girl of her coloring), and flatly in regard to andres relationship to the hacienda and to the land. but because we don’t really spend time anywhere with anyone, we linger no where, the way this materially impacts them doesn’t stick. is she rodolfo’s exotic bride or is she actually criolla-passing if she stays out of the sun? do the other dons and doñas of the haciendas look down on her? do people look at her hair first in surprise? is she aware of the way men react to her because of her heritage? do the priests believe she needs to be civilized and so take a particular tone with her? there are a thousand small ways a racialized existence in the upper echelons of society affect your life--we see none of them from beatriz except as defiant pronouncements about how because of this, she must do things other girls would not. and to be frank, man, i don’t really believe her.
there are three possible stories in this novel. the first is the story of a keen-eyed girl who chooses her husband on purpose, figures out her house is haunted almost immediately, and seeks help. the second is the story of a younger, bastard sister, who committed an unspeakable act to secure an inheritance (that the reader is never entirely clear on), and who is, in the tradition of some of my favorite gothic stories, summarily dragged off to hell for committing this act. the third is the story of racial and religious trauma and terrorism absorbed by the land and the hacienda, and the man able to bridge that conflict to satisfy the restless spirits of his ancestors. none of these are fully committed to, but the second one is truly the most insulting nestled in this book.
we have not talked about juana, rodolfo’s younger sister. when beatriz and rodolfo arrive at the hacienda, she is greeted by the staff, and then juana, his brash younger sister (who, as others have said, is truly the biggest case of lesbian bait i’ve seen in a novel in a minute). the servants, and most especially ana luis (the house keeper), all look up to and respect her. there is a moment where juana seems to like beatriz too, but when beatriz runs screaming to her about a body in the wall, she turns on her and they are firmly set as enemies. this is because: juana bricked a body into the wall. why did she do that? don’t worry. we’ll get there. for the rest of the book, juana is mostly absent, present only in the sense that beatriz resents her, and resents the way she has set ana luisa against her, once in an andres chapter, and then near the end when she gets belligerently drunk at a dinner party. at the end of this dinner party beatriz and andres overhear rodolfo calling her a bastard, threatening to have her evicted from the property if she doesn’t marry, and then strikes her. the next morning juana has murdered rodolfo, and the book careens towards its end where we learn that she also killed rodolfo’s first wife, the malignant presence haunting the house. its implied that juana did this because doña catalina (the first wife) threatened juana’s rule of the house.
ostensibly, juana is present throughout the novel, but her appearance as the actual villain feels like a third act deus ex machina, that satisfies neither the expectations of the genre nor the expectations set by the book. the book’s investments (such as they can be, given everything) lie in two camps: first, beatriz’s terror, a result of the house’s seemingly baseless fixation on her given her ambivalence to her husband and her disconnect from the land and second, the abuse of the staff by rodolfo and catalina. juana doesn’t figure into it at all. beatriz is entirely uninterested in running the actual plantation of the hacienda (a thing both she and the book avoid almost religiously in a way i found both insane and comical), and juana by her own admission has no interest in the house. and because, as with most things in this novel, we spend almost no time with juana we get no sense of her relationship to anything. not her relationship to ana luisa, not her relationship to paloma, not her relationship to beatriz, or to the house, or to catalina. we don’t even know that she wants to run the hacienda until the very end. we don’t know rodolfo and catalina’s relationship to one another, or their shared relationship with juana, or juana’s relationship to the servants. we don’t know why she wants the hacienda and doesn’t want to marry. and she’s deeply representative of the things the novel purports to be interested in but spends no time with. if there is some sinister legacy of the solorzano’s beyond their abuse of servants (which the book doesn’t really care about beyond flavoring for the horror) we aren’t told. that juana is not just a bastard child, but a bastard child of rodolfo’s mother is prime gothic material--the subversion of expectation for women’s behavior under patriarchy is bone and blood deep and manifests not only in her strained relationship with her brother, but in the unwomanlike way she behaves (again, i say, wailing, lesbian bait!). she is neither menacing nor sexual, and because she is absent we lose our only tangible collection to catalina, who menaces beatriz though no one really knows why. and then, even when catalina’s spirit is loosed through an accident she doesn’t pursue juana, she finds ana luisa.
i said in the beginning of this review that the book’s comparison to rebecca has done tremendous damage to the book. this is, in part, because the author does not actually understand what lies at the core of the haunting of the second mrs de winter. the narrator arrives at manderly young, inexperienced in love, sex, and money, of a lower economic class than her husband and his peers, knowing only that she loves maxim de winter and thinking this will be enough. she is haunted by rebecca not because manderly supernaturally rejects her but because she stands on the cusp of womanhood, haunted by its very specific shape, not knowing how to fit into it. the servants are similarly haunted, living inside rebecca’s ghost, her laugh, her fashionable clothing, her charisma and magnetism, all things the second mrs de winter cannot hope to embody. on the solorzano hacienda no one seems to remember catalina. no one talks of how she arranged things, of how she loved them, of how she made them laugh. none of her peers visit beatriz and so her mark on society is largely left unexplored. beatriz is haunted by a crazed ghost with aimless rage--she is collateral because the ghost, and so in many ways the story, does not care for her at all. [continued in comments]
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 3, 2022
i'm gonna remove this from my total for the year because i got to page 97 and just...couldn't do it any more.
i'd like to say if the publisher hadn't likened this book to mexican gothic (moreno-garcia can run laps around canas characterisation in her sleep) and the author didnt do a truly stupid interview where she claimed this book was fixing things she didn't like in REBECCA of all things then maybe i would have been able to cut it a break. but alas, even going into it blind as just a 'gothic horror/romance' you'd be disappointed.
the gothic is famous for atmosphere - crumbling buildings, decaying aristocrats, secrets in the soil, and the stretching of sanity. certainly there are texts that can go from 0-100, but those are usually things like dracula. or anything ever written by wilkie collins.
and they can get away with it because they were forerunners, and unfortunately to the modern eye a lot of the things that would freak someone out in the 1800s are such staples of the mode that they are nothing but pure comedy (see: everything jonathan harker says or does)
so when beatriz first sets foot in the house, gets jump scared about 8 times and instantly suspects foulplay/ghosts/murder/demons/everyone around her its not giving rebecca, its giving the conjuring.
which, again. not so bad! except the conjuring has something else this book doesn't have! interesting and likeable protagonists.
as mentioned with my snide mexican gothic comment earlier, the heroine in this book is uh. hm. how to put this?
okay so you know how philipa gregory (noted historical hack, eternal nemesis etc) has this real problem in her writing where every woman is like 'i will seize the crown and take part in LAW and dont care WHAT my dad says' and you're reading it like 'this seems....wildly modern and out of place for 1253'
it's the same thing here! only, it's not even able to commit to that because despite beatriz telling us repeatedly she's marrying for MONEY and to be her OWN WOMAN in the next paragraph she is crying in her bed wishing her husband was home so he could scare away the demons.
she comes off as false, even in her own narration, which COULD be clever is the writer had actually intended it and did anything with that. but as established this writer seems to just be cutting bits out of other books she liked and pasting them over not really understanding how those things work or why.
and before anyone gets the bright idea to be all 'oh so women in history didnt WANT things huh? didnt want POWER? what about [insert every queen in history etc]' i only have issue with authors who do stuff like this with their heroines without seeming to take into account any historical context, and seem to view the arenas of power women were able to operate in as lesser, and don't particularly seem to want to investigate why or how any woman who broke the mould did what she did (or how it actually ended for a lot of them)
its immersion breaking (not great for historical fiction), and also makes beatriz incredibly shallow. she's not got any real desires of her own outside of being a mouthpiece to demonstrate the author is Challenging the Genre and Doing a Feminism.
again, the heroine from mexican gothic is ALIVE. you get the sense she would be doing something if the perspective left her, whereas everyone in the hacienda would be dropped to the floor until the author required her dolls for the next scene.
also - for a novel that purports to be about Doing the Feminism why, oh why, did we need to random priest to get a perspective?
from the standpoint of 're-writing rebecca' its a misunderstanding of the source material so profound it is comical, from the lense of a novel that wants to be about female empowerment in a traditionally chauvinistic genre it undercuts the heroines voice, and from a craft perspective having a guy there who can apparently speak to the dead and knows a lot of the answers NARRATING THEM TO THE READER its shooting your tension in the KNEES.
he even gets the first chapter!!!!! (which, hysterically i didn't realise, and almost didnt realise it again when the perspective switched because these perspectives sound SO IDENTICAL)
im disappointed, and i have no idea who i could even recommend this book too? someone who has lived in a cave and seen no pop culture around horror in their entire lives?
read...literally anything else. hell, read rebecca. read DRACULA. read the wikipedia synopsis for the conjuring.
do NOT read this.
i'd like to say if the publisher hadn't likened this book to mexican gothic (moreno-garcia can run laps around canas characterisation in her sleep) and the author didnt do a truly stupid interview where she claimed this book was fixing things she didn't like in REBECCA of all things then maybe i would have been able to cut it a break. but alas, even going into it blind as just a 'gothic horror/romance' you'd be disappointed.
the gothic is famous for atmosphere - crumbling buildings, decaying aristocrats, secrets in the soil, and the stretching of sanity. certainly there are texts that can go from 0-100, but those are usually things like dracula. or anything ever written by wilkie collins.
and they can get away with it because they were forerunners, and unfortunately to the modern eye a lot of the things that would freak someone out in the 1800s are such staples of the mode that they are nothing but pure comedy (see: everything jonathan harker says or does)
so when beatriz first sets foot in the house, gets jump scared about 8 times and instantly suspects foulplay/ghosts/murder/demons/everyone around her its not giving rebecca, its giving the conjuring.
which, again. not so bad! except the conjuring has something else this book doesn't have! interesting and likeable protagonists.
as mentioned with my snide mexican gothic comment earlier, the heroine in this book is uh. hm. how to put this?
okay so you know how philipa gregory (noted historical hack, eternal nemesis etc) has this real problem in her writing where every woman is like 'i will seize the crown and take part in LAW and dont care WHAT my dad says' and you're reading it like 'this seems....wildly modern and out of place for 1253'
it's the same thing here! only, it's not even able to commit to that because despite beatriz telling us repeatedly she's marrying for MONEY and to be her OWN WOMAN in the next paragraph she is crying in her bed wishing her husband was home so he could scare away the demons.
she comes off as false, even in her own narration, which COULD be clever is the writer had actually intended it and did anything with that. but as established this writer seems to just be cutting bits out of other books she liked and pasting them over not really understanding how those things work or why.
and before anyone gets the bright idea to be all 'oh so women in history didnt WANT things huh? didnt want POWER? what about [insert every queen in history etc]' i only have issue with authors who do stuff like this with their heroines without seeming to take into account any historical context, and seem to view the arenas of power women were able to operate in as lesser, and don't particularly seem to want to investigate why or how any woman who broke the mould did what she did (or how it actually ended for a lot of them)
its immersion breaking (not great for historical fiction), and also makes beatriz incredibly shallow. she's not got any real desires of her own outside of being a mouthpiece to demonstrate the author is Challenging the Genre and Doing a Feminism.
again, the heroine from mexican gothic is ALIVE. you get the sense she would be doing something if the perspective left her, whereas everyone in the hacienda would be dropped to the floor until the author required her dolls for the next scene.
also - for a novel that purports to be about Doing the Feminism why, oh why, did we need to random priest to get a perspective?
from the standpoint of 're-writing rebecca' its a misunderstanding of the source material so profound it is comical, from the lense of a novel that wants to be about female empowerment in a traditionally chauvinistic genre it undercuts the heroines voice, and from a craft perspective having a guy there who can apparently speak to the dead and knows a lot of the answers NARRATING THEM TO THE READER its shooting your tension in the KNEES.
he even gets the first chapter!!!!! (which, hysterically i didn't realise, and almost didnt realise it again when the perspective switched because these perspectives sound SO IDENTICAL)
im disappointed, and i have no idea who i could even recommend this book too? someone who has lived in a cave and seen no pop culture around horror in their entire lives?
read...literally anything else. hell, read rebecca. read DRACULA. read the wikipedia synopsis for the conjuring.
do NOT read this.
May 16, 2022
Review originally published at Cemetery Dance:
https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/...
..
Isabel Cañas’ striking debut, The Hacienda, is a historical, Gothic horror novel enticing readers with a compelling haunted house tale while making a grab for hearts with a love story nestled in its core.
Beatriz is a fierce, wildly independent woman with ambition who sets her sights well above her lowly station. Beatriz and her mother were forced to move in with a family member after her father dies in Mexico’s War of Independence.
One night, she meets a wealthy widower and immediately decides that he is her ticket out of their dire situation. They marry and she is whisked off to the estate of her dreams.
The reality of her new life becomes uncertain as soon as she arrives at Hacienda San Isidro.
This is where the big “Rebecca” vibes enter the room! The fantasies of the idyllic marriage to a wealthy, powerful man and living a life of luxury in his beautiful estate begin to dissipate.
The author does an amazing job painting a vivid sense of place. She describes the landscape and the hacienda with intricate details so that the reader feels they are touring the grounds right alongside Beatriz as she sees her new home for the first time.
Cañas leans into classic Gothic traditions by immersing the reader in the narrative; wrapping luscious prose in a cloak of dark, haunting atmosphere with that glorious sense of doom and gloom. It’s utterly mesmerizing to the point of never wanting to separate from its grip. Plan to spend long hours in this book.
The unexpected aspects of this book are best left for readers to discover on their own but it’s important to mention that investment in the characters is at a premium, especially Padre Andrés.
The Hacienda is an exciting debut because it masterfully selects the best parts of several horror sub-genres and works them together to create something altogether unique and hauntingly magical. This is a must read and Isabel Cañas is one to watch.
https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/...
..
Isabel Cañas’ striking debut, The Hacienda, is a historical, Gothic horror novel enticing readers with a compelling haunted house tale while making a grab for hearts with a love story nestled in its core.
Beatriz is a fierce, wildly independent woman with ambition who sets her sights well above her lowly station. Beatriz and her mother were forced to move in with a family member after her father dies in Mexico’s War of Independence.
One night, she meets a wealthy widower and immediately decides that he is her ticket out of their dire situation. They marry and she is whisked off to the estate of her dreams.
The reality of her new life becomes uncertain as soon as she arrives at Hacienda San Isidro.
This is where the big “Rebecca” vibes enter the room! The fantasies of the idyllic marriage to a wealthy, powerful man and living a life of luxury in his beautiful estate begin to dissipate.
The author does an amazing job painting a vivid sense of place. She describes the landscape and the hacienda with intricate details so that the reader feels they are touring the grounds right alongside Beatriz as she sees her new home for the first time.
Cañas leans into classic Gothic traditions by immersing the reader in the narrative; wrapping luscious prose in a cloak of dark, haunting atmosphere with that glorious sense of doom and gloom. It’s utterly mesmerizing to the point of never wanting to separate from its grip. Plan to spend long hours in this book.
The unexpected aspects of this book are best left for readers to discover on their own but it’s important to mention that investment in the characters is at a premium, especially Padre Andrés.
The Hacienda is an exciting debut because it masterfully selects the best parts of several horror sub-genres and works them together to create something altogether unique and hauntingly magical. This is a must read and Isabel Cañas is one to watch.
Read
May 7, 2023this book was delicious, dark, spooky, and kind of sexy. beautiful prose and a haunting, suspenseful, romantic subplot that kept me intrigued and engaged.
September 14, 2023
4 stars!
In the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz finds herself the daughter of a disgraced general and relying on the charity of her relatives to survive. When Don Rodolfo offers to marry her, she takes it right away even with the rumors surrounding the death of his first wife. But when Beatriz arrives at Hacienda San Isidro she can tell right away there is something rotten inside the house. And that dark something in the house, doesn’t want her in it.
I really enjoyed this book which is funny because I almost quit when I began listening. But after an hour or two of the audiobook it took a turn for the better and I became enthralled by the story. It’s marketed as Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca and that’s pretty accurate, it’s less gory than Mexican Gothic (thank god because I am a wimp) and it’s similar to Rebecca but with more supernatural involved. The story was the perfect amount of creepy to listen to at the start of spooky season and I could still sleep at night so there’s a bonus.
I really liked the main character Beatriz, even though I think she made some stupid decisions (I understand why, but horror genre is filled with people making dumb choices) and I really loved the character of Andres, the priest who helps her. Both characters had great chemistry and motivations to drive the story and it all came together really well.
This is a book worth reading and I will be recommending it a lot.
In the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz finds herself the daughter of a disgraced general and relying on the charity of her relatives to survive. When Don Rodolfo offers to marry her, she takes it right away even with the rumors surrounding the death of his first wife. But when Beatriz arrives at Hacienda San Isidro she can tell right away there is something rotten inside the house. And that dark something in the house, doesn’t want her in it.
I really enjoyed this book which is funny because I almost quit when I began listening. But after an hour or two of the audiobook it took a turn for the better and I became enthralled by the story. It’s marketed as Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca and that’s pretty accurate, it’s less gory than Mexican Gothic (thank god because I am a wimp) and it’s similar to Rebecca but with more supernatural involved. The story was the perfect amount of creepy to listen to at the start of spooky season and I could still sleep at night so there’s a bonus.
I really liked the main character Beatriz, even though I think she made some stupid decisions (I understand why, but horror genre is filled with people making dumb choices) and I really loved the character of Andres, the priest who helps her. Both characters had great chemistry and motivations to drive the story and it all came together really well.
This is a book worth reading and I will be recommending it a lot.
August 17, 2023
This was my book club read for August. I liked it, but didn't love it.
I loved how atmospheric and creepy it was. But...I just don't think it was the book for me. I'm not into the supernatural theming and this one did have that. The beginning was a bit slow and it took me quite a long time to get into it. I kept avoiding going back to it but I knew I needed to get it done.
The sections with the two narrators, Beatriz and Andres, didn't really have unique voices. I thought they seemed kind of one note and sometimes I forgot whose perspective I was reading.
Overall, I'm glad I read it because it is a unique read. It's definitely a book that has fans but just not for me.
I loved how atmospheric and creepy it was. But...I just don't think it was the book for me. I'm not into the supernatural theming and this one did have that. The beginning was a bit slow and it took me quite a long time to get into it. I kept avoiding going back to it but I knew I needed to get it done.
The sections with the two narrators, Beatriz and Andres, didn't really have unique voices. I thought they seemed kind of one note and sometimes I forgot whose perspective I was reading.
Overall, I'm glad I read it because it is a unique read. It's definitely a book that has fans but just not for me.
October 15, 2022
Fans of Rebecca…should reread Rebecca.
May 10, 2022
if mexican gothic had been good
January 5, 2023
It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book as well as those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters which contain reflections on rape, colourism, substance abuse, child endangerment, parental abuse, & others.
Beatriz marries Rodolfo for his social status; she wants the money that was taken away from her after the politically motivated murder of her father; to regain her place amongst the social elite, though she would never state that these are innately the things that she wants. Rather, Beatriz boasts about accepting Rodolfo’s proposal so that both her & her mother can leave the home of her aunt, who housed them after the death of their father & exile from the community. Yet, all the while, Beatriz is ravenous to declare Hacienda San Isidro her home, her possession, her property, & hers alone. To which I am left wondering whom amongst the slew of self-serving characters am I meant to root for?
Firstly, I acknowledge that many unseasoned, casual, readers will find many things to love in this book. Throughout my entire reading experience, I knew that I was not someone for whom this book would have been recommended because I have read too many books to meander behind the hand-holding, poor literary approach of the author towards a subject matter that could have blown me away. That is to say that the scene & time period in which Cañas wrote this story is one that is riddled with intrigue & mysticism, two things this story would have benefited from. However, following the lead of such a main character as Beatriz leads one down a road that sees them exiting the interest they held towards any of what was being written.
The political situation in Mexico during the time period in which this story was set (1820-) is one that could have been presented with a bit more depth. There is certainly nothing innately wrong with leading the reader to further their knowledge by doing their own personal research but, this does stunt the flow of reading as one must pause to ensure that the political details that are being swept past, are well comprehended & to ensure that their relevancy to the story is accurate. Therefore, I think had Cañas introduced the story with a foreword about the scene that would be set, I feel we would be left with the profound feelings of unease & struggle that we are meant to feel emanating from the pages throughout the story.
What reinforces the disconnect between the scenes presented to the reader & the plot at large resides solely in the ineptitudes of the characters. This is a story that has been done many times before & should you be in the market for a decent haunted house I encourage you to start at the source. In my experience, books that are sold as a retelling of a principle that has already been succeeded upon by another author, fall flat by their inabilities to build on their own merit & originality. What renders Beatriz’s story one that is unlike any other you’ve read before? Was it very difficult to gauge who the murderer was after being introduced to Juana & her laughter regarding a mutilated rat? I think not. This is very unfortunate because the author paired beautifully intimate cultural aspects of lore & mysticism within the plot to add distinction to its storyline yet failed to render these serious aspects of the story.
The dialogue that follows each character grew to be some of the most cringe-worthy I have read in a while. Asking me to believe that because Beatriz was the ‘daughter of a general’ would render her capable of any of the random things she decided to try & accomplish, is laughable. This is a character who proclaims she has a deep & respectful relationship with her mother yet never once has a conversation with her regarding her plan to marry a rich man to help them better their situation. Why is that? How am I to believe that this character is anything but idiotic when all she has done the entire story is be brain-dead bananas? Beatriz took it upon herself to seek out a wealthy man who had the means to grant her, her every wish. She wanted to not have to do the physical labour & menial jobs that her aunt was imposing upon both herself & her mother because they were social & political pariahs.
I found it absurd that I was meant to feel fondness toward Beatriz. She might be a good person, deep in her soul, but her actions do not prove that to be true. She never speaks to her mother about her marriage until she is well-passed accepting Rodolfo’s proposal. She moves to San Isidro without consulting with her mother & plans to bring her mother to the new house, without ever asking if this is what she would want. Beatriz never makes any effort to befriend Juana whom one might rightfully wonder at; why is this woman working the fields of a property that is allegedly her family’s? Everything that Beatriz chooses to do is because she has set herself the goal to do it alone. Is it necessarily bad to want to better one’s life? No. Is it weird to exclude the only family you love in all your plans for social climbing & sleeping with ‘the enemy’? Yes.
What I find to be the most noisome aspect of this story is the request for me to look past the banal mental abilities of the main character. Surely, these stories succeed as they do because the women are never in a position to ask questions & they never feel it appropriate to ponder anything. Yet, I cannot in my right mind believe that this is actually true. One can certainly be raised to not speak out of turn & one can most definitely not feel it their place to ask about a dead family member—respectable topics of conversation to be abided—yet, one most certainly wonders about the disjointed events transpiring around them. I understand that Beatriz could not outright ask Paloma what happened to Rodolfo’s first wife but, there needs to come a time when women are not being written as imbeciles simply because they were outwardly treated as such. It’s insulting to read an entire book wherein the main character is a floundering fish out of water because she refused to grasp any straw placed near her hand due to her infallible desire to oust anyone not aligned with her goal of possessing her own home.
Is it so farfetched to think that the man who gawked at you because of your skin tone might also be a shallow, mean-intentioned person? Rodolfo proves to have no redeeming characteristics yet we are to look past all this because Beatriz cannot read the room. This is rendered an extremely weird decision because Beatriz wallows about the treatment she received from her aunt regarding her skin pigmentation. Again, here lies an insanely important topic to be properly introduced within the book & yet, it is employed simply to grant distinction between women. How was colourism altering Beatriz’s lived experiences? Her father was a very respected general--from whom she inherited her complexion--yet we read not about what prejudices befell a person who was darker than another. It is not enough to simply insert key phrases about becoming ‘darker with sun exposure’ for the reader to glean the insane mistreatment that people experience due to colourism. As well, what differentiates colourism in Mexico (in this time period) from what we see happening today?
The primary reason for which I felt this book would find enjoyment in the hands of causal versus habitual readers is that the details presented in the dialogue border on redundant. Beatriz is constantly telling us that she is the daughter of a general & will therefore vanquish her demons. We circle this thought process endlessly & see her screaming down the staircase evermore. We read about an evil part of Andrés while never seeing this come to fruition & rather watch him fall in love with Beatriz because she never had the gumption to question what she didn’t understand. I think we should be more kind to one another but, to sit with someone who tells you they are a witch & not blink an eye does not lead me to believe you’re an accepting person, it leaves me to believe that you’ve no girth to your personality & haven’t the brains to think of anything to say. Posing a question isn’t a negative thing. It’s ok to ask what it means to be a witch—truly what does it mean in connection to the town & Mexico as a whole? What place is left for Andrés in the rational world of his peers? The town seems to adore him yet, he has to remain hidden due to the general political views of the country but, how many other people are witches too? How did he know that hearing voices was not something else entirely?
So much of the intrigue we should have felt vanished when we are led towards the conclusion it appears we had already arrived at chapters before. For example, Beatriz sees that the corpse within the wall has a specific necklace, then she dreams about the demon apparition of the first wife, then we walk to the grave only to have Andrés confirm to us that her body isn't there....we already knew that? Why did we have to read about this thrice, if not more? Had the author presented new information at that time this all would have been validated but again, we circle the same things over & over again.
Granting the characters no depth to their beings prevented the story from blossoming into a horrific tale of a body crumpled into a wall; a serial rapist turning a blind eye to the murder of his victims; political outrage & violence; torture, torment & fear. Every single character in this book is a shadow of the people they should & could be. What rendered the relationship between Beatriz & Andrés so special save for the fact that neither of them cared a lick for looking further into the mental state of the other & were seemingly bonded by trauma? What happened to Juana as a child to make her so distant from the social requirements that would be imposed upon her? Why did Rodolfo not care about Beatriz’s father or his involvement in the war?
I will applaud Cañas for some of the more gruesome supernatural aspects of the story. My favourite was the body in the hall. The visual descriptions given to the ghost corpse as it slowly raised an actively decomposing arm towards Beatriz, were superb & I wish there had been more of that. However, I realize that for certain readers this might not be what they were looking to read & therefore regain my stance that, this is not a book that is necessary for habitual readers of horror for, there is little that is horrific about this story. I read another review that stated something along the lines of; if all the supernatural occurrences were removed you would have a better story & I am inclined to agree. What did it add for us to read numerous scenes in which Andrés was attempting to summon the ‘dark’ parts of himself to exorcise the house?
Save for the few cool descriptions of an angry ghost, there wasn’t much to pique my interest in this plot. I couldn’t care less about the haunting of a woman who loved her rapist husband's violent tendencies that coincided with her murderous desires. I couldn’t find it within me to feel propelled forward through pages at end of a blossoming ‘love’ between characters who were all talk & no show when it came to having a backbone. Why did Beatriz want Andrés to abandon everything he knows for her? She had nothing in the city but her mother. All the friends & acquaintances she grew to know & appreciate were in this town yet, she expected Andrés to simply walk away from the life he had been building to follow her in her quest for....what?
I could not get behind Juana appearing at her leisure whilst Beatriz was rampaging through the house ripping wooden beams away. Rodolfo must have known that Juana killed his wife. He willingly did not go into a wing of the house, nor ever check why it was blocked off. He never sought to ask why he was not summoned when his wife died so that he could attempt to be present for her burial. I doubt it.
All in all, this isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read & I find myself at a loss to want to continue writing this review because I know & recognize that this is a book that many people will love, for valid reasons. I am happy to know that it will find itself in the hands of its ideal reader. However, I find myself disappointed that so many opportunities were passed over within the plot to render this the tale of a truly mind-numbingly scary haunted house.
Beatriz marries Rodolfo for his social status; she wants the money that was taken away from her after the politically motivated murder of her father; to regain her place amongst the social elite, though she would never state that these are innately the things that she wants. Rather, Beatriz boasts about accepting Rodolfo’s proposal so that both her & her mother can leave the home of her aunt, who housed them after the death of their father & exile from the community. Yet, all the while, Beatriz is ravenous to declare Hacienda San Isidro her home, her possession, her property, & hers alone. To which I am left wondering whom amongst the slew of self-serving characters am I meant to root for?
Firstly, I acknowledge that many unseasoned, casual, readers will find many things to love in this book. Throughout my entire reading experience, I knew that I was not someone for whom this book would have been recommended because I have read too many books to meander behind the hand-holding, poor literary approach of the author towards a subject matter that could have blown me away. That is to say that the scene & time period in which Cañas wrote this story is one that is riddled with intrigue & mysticism, two things this story would have benefited from. However, following the lead of such a main character as Beatriz leads one down a road that sees them exiting the interest they held towards any of what was being written.
The political situation in Mexico during the time period in which this story was set (1820-) is one that could have been presented with a bit more depth. There is certainly nothing innately wrong with leading the reader to further their knowledge by doing their own personal research but, this does stunt the flow of reading as one must pause to ensure that the political details that are being swept past, are well comprehended & to ensure that their relevancy to the story is accurate. Therefore, I think had Cañas introduced the story with a foreword about the scene that would be set, I feel we would be left with the profound feelings of unease & struggle that we are meant to feel emanating from the pages throughout the story.
What reinforces the disconnect between the scenes presented to the reader & the plot at large resides solely in the ineptitudes of the characters. This is a story that has been done many times before & should you be in the market for a decent haunted house I encourage you to start at the source. In my experience, books that are sold as a retelling of a principle that has already been succeeded upon by another author, fall flat by their inabilities to build on their own merit & originality. What renders Beatriz’s story one that is unlike any other you’ve read before? Was it very difficult to gauge who the murderer was after being introduced to Juana & her laughter regarding a mutilated rat? I think not. This is very unfortunate because the author paired beautifully intimate cultural aspects of lore & mysticism within the plot to add distinction to its storyline yet failed to render these serious aspects of the story.
The dialogue that follows each character grew to be some of the most cringe-worthy I have read in a while. Asking me to believe that because Beatriz was the ‘daughter of a general’ would render her capable of any of the random things she decided to try & accomplish, is laughable. This is a character who proclaims she has a deep & respectful relationship with her mother yet never once has a conversation with her regarding her plan to marry a rich man to help them better their situation. Why is that? How am I to believe that this character is anything but idiotic when all she has done the entire story is be brain-dead bananas? Beatriz took it upon herself to seek out a wealthy man who had the means to grant her, her every wish. She wanted to not have to do the physical labour & menial jobs that her aunt was imposing upon both herself & her mother because they were social & political pariahs.
I found it absurd that I was meant to feel fondness toward Beatriz. She might be a good person, deep in her soul, but her actions do not prove that to be true. She never speaks to her mother about her marriage until she is well-passed accepting Rodolfo’s proposal. She moves to San Isidro without consulting with her mother & plans to bring her mother to the new house, without ever asking if this is what she would want. Beatriz never makes any effort to befriend Juana whom one might rightfully wonder at; why is this woman working the fields of a property that is allegedly her family’s? Everything that Beatriz chooses to do is because she has set herself the goal to do it alone. Is it necessarily bad to want to better one’s life? No. Is it weird to exclude the only family you love in all your plans for social climbing & sleeping with ‘the enemy’? Yes.
What I find to be the most noisome aspect of this story is the request for me to look past the banal mental abilities of the main character. Surely, these stories succeed as they do because the women are never in a position to ask questions & they never feel it appropriate to ponder anything. Yet, I cannot in my right mind believe that this is actually true. One can certainly be raised to not speak out of turn & one can most definitely not feel it their place to ask about a dead family member—respectable topics of conversation to be abided—yet, one most certainly wonders about the disjointed events transpiring around them. I understand that Beatriz could not outright ask Paloma what happened to Rodolfo’s first wife but, there needs to come a time when women are not being written as imbeciles simply because they were outwardly treated as such. It’s insulting to read an entire book wherein the main character is a floundering fish out of water because she refused to grasp any straw placed near her hand due to her infallible desire to oust anyone not aligned with her goal of possessing her own home.
Is it so farfetched to think that the man who gawked at you because of your skin tone might also be a shallow, mean-intentioned person? Rodolfo proves to have no redeeming characteristics yet we are to look past all this because Beatriz cannot read the room. This is rendered an extremely weird decision because Beatriz wallows about the treatment she received from her aunt regarding her skin pigmentation. Again, here lies an insanely important topic to be properly introduced within the book & yet, it is employed simply to grant distinction between women. How was colourism altering Beatriz’s lived experiences? Her father was a very respected general--from whom she inherited her complexion--yet we read not about what prejudices befell a person who was darker than another. It is not enough to simply insert key phrases about becoming ‘darker with sun exposure’ for the reader to glean the insane mistreatment that people experience due to colourism. As well, what differentiates colourism in Mexico (in this time period) from what we see happening today?
The primary reason for which I felt this book would find enjoyment in the hands of causal versus habitual readers is that the details presented in the dialogue border on redundant. Beatriz is constantly telling us that she is the daughter of a general & will therefore vanquish her demons. We circle this thought process endlessly & see her screaming down the staircase evermore. We read about an evil part of Andrés while never seeing this come to fruition & rather watch him fall in love with Beatriz because she never had the gumption to question what she didn’t understand. I think we should be more kind to one another but, to sit with someone who tells you they are a witch & not blink an eye does not lead me to believe you’re an accepting person, it leaves me to believe that you’ve no girth to your personality & haven’t the brains to think of anything to say. Posing a question isn’t a negative thing. It’s ok to ask what it means to be a witch—truly what does it mean in connection to the town & Mexico as a whole? What place is left for Andrés in the rational world of his peers? The town seems to adore him yet, he has to remain hidden due to the general political views of the country but, how many other people are witches too? How did he know that hearing voices was not something else entirely?
So much of the intrigue we should have felt vanished when we are led towards the conclusion it appears we had already arrived at chapters before. For example, Beatriz sees that the corpse within the wall has a specific necklace, then she dreams about the demon apparition of the first wife, then we walk to the grave only to have Andrés confirm to us that her body isn't there....we already knew that? Why did we have to read about this thrice, if not more? Had the author presented new information at that time this all would have been validated but again, we circle the same things over & over again.
Granting the characters no depth to their beings prevented the story from blossoming into a horrific tale of a body crumpled into a wall; a serial rapist turning a blind eye to the murder of his victims; political outrage & violence; torture, torment & fear. Every single character in this book is a shadow of the people they should & could be. What rendered the relationship between Beatriz & Andrés so special save for the fact that neither of them cared a lick for looking further into the mental state of the other & were seemingly bonded by trauma? What happened to Juana as a child to make her so distant from the social requirements that would be imposed upon her? Why did Rodolfo not care about Beatriz’s father or his involvement in the war?
I will applaud Cañas for some of the more gruesome supernatural aspects of the story. My favourite was the body in the hall. The visual descriptions given to the ghost corpse as it slowly raised an actively decomposing arm towards Beatriz, were superb & I wish there had been more of that. However, I realize that for certain readers this might not be what they were looking to read & therefore regain my stance that, this is not a book that is necessary for habitual readers of horror for, there is little that is horrific about this story. I read another review that stated something along the lines of; if all the supernatural occurrences were removed you would have a better story & I am inclined to agree. What did it add for us to read numerous scenes in which Andrés was attempting to summon the ‘dark’ parts of himself to exorcise the house?
Save for the few cool descriptions of an angry ghost, there wasn’t much to pique my interest in this plot. I couldn’t care less about the haunting of a woman who loved her rapist husband's violent tendencies that coincided with her murderous desires. I couldn’t find it within me to feel propelled forward through pages at end of a blossoming ‘love’ between characters who were all talk & no show when it came to having a backbone. Why did Beatriz want Andrés to abandon everything he knows for her? She had nothing in the city but her mother. All the friends & acquaintances she grew to know & appreciate were in this town yet, she expected Andrés to simply walk away from the life he had been building to follow her in her quest for....what?
I could not get behind Juana appearing at her leisure whilst Beatriz was rampaging through the house ripping wooden beams away. Rodolfo must have known that Juana killed his wife. He willingly did not go into a wing of the house, nor ever check why it was blocked off. He never sought to ask why he was not summoned when his wife died so that he could attempt to be present for her burial. I doubt it.
All in all, this isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read & I find myself at a loss to want to continue writing this review because I know & recognize that this is a book that many people will love, for valid reasons. I am happy to know that it will find itself in the hands of its ideal reader. However, I find myself disappointed that so many opportunities were passed over within the plot to render this the tale of a truly mind-numbingly scary haunted house.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 28, 2022
4 stars!
The description of this book says Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca. I can see the similarities, but I think The Hacienda is its on creepy beast stalking from the corners of the room.
The creep factor in The Hacienda was great and the old gothic feel of the book worked for me.
The main character, Beatriz was a tough and fantastic character to cheer for and she had a grittiness that I just loved. I felt she was a good match for the horror of that house, Hacienda San Isidro.
The mystery of what happened to the first Doña Solórzano was good but it wasn't a plot twist for me. I had an idea who the killer was before I got to the halfway point of the book, but even though I knew who killed her, it didn’t take away from the enjoyment of the book.
I loved all the crazy moments when Beatriz and Andrés are trying to save her life but also save the soul of the property.
The gothic, witchy and supernatural vibes in this are well done!
I did like the ending of the book even though I can see how some readers might be a bit disappointed. I felt it was realistic and it would have likely turned out like that in real life.
In fact, the more that I think about this book as I’m writing this review, the more I realize how entertaining it was and loved the magical spell that was cast over me!
The description of this book says Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca. I can see the similarities, but I think The Hacienda is its on creepy beast stalking from the corners of the room.
The creep factor in The Hacienda was great and the old gothic feel of the book worked for me.
The main character, Beatriz was a tough and fantastic character to cheer for and she had a grittiness that I just loved. I felt she was a good match for the horror of that house, Hacienda San Isidro.
The mystery of what happened to the first Doña Solórzano was good but it wasn't a plot twist for me. I had an idea who the killer was before I got to the halfway point of the book, but even though I knew who killed her, it didn’t take away from the enjoyment of the book.
I loved all the crazy moments when Beatriz and Andrés are trying to save her life but also save the soul of the property.
The gothic, witchy and supernatural vibes in this are well done!
I did like the ending of the book even though I can see how some readers might be a bit disappointed. I felt it was realistic and it would have likely turned out like that in real life.
In fact, the more that I think about this book as I’m writing this review, the more I realize how entertaining it was and loved the magical spell that was cast over me!
June 7, 2022
As I said in my Siren Queen review, some of the things that annoyed me about this book were because of my own expectations. HOWEVER a lot of the stuff that annoyed me was 100% the authors fault and here they are in no particular order:
1) Timelines/POVs
What is the point of having a POV character who is a Witch, has lived at San Isidro since he was a child, experiences all of the supernatural elements and has THREE CHAPTERS that take place during the year that Doña Catalina dies and yet NONE of it builds up to her death or explains why it happens? How do you have lines like this: "I had seen women like her in Guadalajara....hands as soft as a lamb's...utterly incapable of working. Such people could not survive long in the country...I was sure that his spun-sugar wife would flee back to the comforts of the capital [when the war ended], typhus or no. How very wrong I was" OR this: "I would find my way back to her, to this place if it was the last thing I did. No Solórzano could keep me from my home. My grief crystallized the thought into a white-hot prayer, branding it on my bones like a promise. God help me, I will be back." and then he's not there at the time of her death? And not only is he not there at the time of her death BUT we never find out WHEN she dies. The three POVs take place in December 1820, January 1821 and February 1821. The first one she says nothing, the second one they just pray and then the third one she shows up to Be Evil. Like he basically just said "LOL! I will just wait and not do anything." ALSO! How did she know that the herbs he had were for abortions????? It was giving "what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?" This leads me into the second thing that annoyed me.
2)Women and their motivations
Spoilers right off the back. Juana and Ana Luisa killed Doña Catalina because who even knows why. We never got a scene with Juana and Catalina, nor did we get a scene with Ana Luisa or Catalina. Or the three of them together. We don't know why they didn't like each other besides Doña Catalina was Just Evil, which like Okay But Why? And also How? Because once again we only got two scenes with Catalina in it and neither of the scenes were with her murderer. We never got a scene showing Catalina interacting with any of the household workers which SHOWS why they didn't like her and vice versa. We also experienced this in the present with Beatriz, Juana and Ana Luisa. There's a line where Beatriz says something like "Ana Luisa and I never got to know each other, we were always adversaries because Juana stood between us" and it's like WHAT???? You barely had any scenes together and when you did all that would happen is you would be like "do this thing, now" and she would do it and we would get internal dialogue about how "I Snapped At Her But I Didn't Mean To, I Simply Had Flashbacks To When I Worked At Tia Fernanda's And I Need This House To Be Mine." What was Juana's motivation for killing Catalina? And why would Ana Luisa help her? Is it because of Paloma/Mariana? Juana's a racist and wouldn't care about that. And how did they get so close? I Am Once Again Asking Why There Were No Scenes Showing Them Together.
3) Darkness
This is related to point number one/Andrés, but every time I read the words "darkest, darker, dark box" in relation to Andrés powers, I wanted to take a shot but then I would have blacked out. It was stupid, and this is why: what about that part of his heritage is so much worse than his Titi's? How can he see what his grandmother did and also help her and ALSO do the work when he grows up but when it comes to this other side he "promised to never unlock the dark box." We never find out WHY it is. We never even find out if he had tried it before and something bad happened and that's why. We never even find out what exactly it does. In the climax, he finally opens the box and grabs some rainclouds and brings them down to put out the fire over San Isidro, but his grandmother literally could do that as well so how is it so different? It just makes no sense.
4) Romance
I know that attraction is a big part of romance, but I'm so over the whole "I saw them and fell in love at first sight because they are so attractive/I knew they were different." I Am Once Again Asking WHY. What is it about them that makes you feel this way?
5)Beatriz
This could be part of the second point but I had to make it standalone because it really made the things that annoyed me in this book annoy me more. In this interview: https://www.thebigthrill.org/2022/05/..., Cañas speaks about how the main character in Rebecca was passive and she wrote Beatriz specifically in conversation with her, that she wanted the climax of this book to be about Beatriz taking more initiative, that she "push[ed] back," "fought tooth and nail." That is Not What Happened. Beatriz spent the book going from "I Can't Sleep In This House Alone Without Rodolfo Here" to "I Can't Sleep In This House Alone Without Andrés Here." And in between that she would make comments about how She Didn't Marry For Love, She Married For Comfort, She Wanted A Home That Was Hers, She Is A FeministTM. Something that's really annoying about modern retellings or books that's written in conversation with other books is that in the retelling they take out everything that made the original fun or interesting and also somehow manage to it less feminist. Like how is this more feminist? Because she says she married for Political Reasons instead of for love? How is it more feminist when she spends the whole climax tied up about to burn to death and the man is the one that saves her? How is it more feminist that she spends more time talking to Andrés than any of the women who she is supposed to have tension with? How is it more feminist if we never find out what any of these women want? If they never even have a damn personality?
1) Timelines/POVs
What is the point of having a POV character who is a Witch, has lived at San Isidro since he was a child, experiences all of the supernatural elements and has THREE CHAPTERS that take place during the year that Doña Catalina dies and yet NONE of it builds up to her death or explains why it happens? How do you have lines like this: "I had seen women like her in Guadalajara....hands as soft as a lamb's...utterly incapable of working. Such people could not survive long in the country...I was sure that his spun-sugar wife would flee back to the comforts of the capital [when the war ended], typhus or no. How very wrong I was" OR this: "I would find my way back to her, to this place if it was the last thing I did. No Solórzano could keep me from my home. My grief crystallized the thought into a white-hot prayer, branding it on my bones like a promise. God help me, I will be back." and then he's not there at the time of her death? And not only is he not there at the time of her death BUT we never find out WHEN she dies. The three POVs take place in December 1820, January 1821 and February 1821. The first one she says nothing, the second one they just pray and then the third one she shows up to Be Evil. Like he basically just said "LOL! I will just wait and not do anything." ALSO! How did she know that the herbs he had were for abortions????? It was giving "what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?" This leads me into the second thing that annoyed me.
2)Women and their motivations
Spoilers right off the back. Juana and Ana Luisa killed Doña Catalina because who even knows why. We never got a scene with Juana and Catalina, nor did we get a scene with Ana Luisa or Catalina. Or the three of them together. We don't know why they didn't like each other besides Doña Catalina was Just Evil, which like Okay But Why? And also How? Because once again we only got two scenes with Catalina in it and neither of the scenes were with her murderer. We never got a scene showing Catalina interacting with any of the household workers which SHOWS why they didn't like her and vice versa. We also experienced this in the present with Beatriz, Juana and Ana Luisa. There's a line where Beatriz says something like "Ana Luisa and I never got to know each other, we were always adversaries because Juana stood between us" and it's like WHAT???? You barely had any scenes together and when you did all that would happen is you would be like "do this thing, now" and she would do it and we would get internal dialogue about how "I Snapped At Her But I Didn't Mean To, I Simply Had Flashbacks To When I Worked At Tia Fernanda's And I Need This House To Be Mine." What was Juana's motivation for killing Catalina? And why would Ana Luisa help her? Is it because of Paloma/Mariana? Juana's a racist and wouldn't care about that. And how did they get so close? I Am Once Again Asking Why There Were No Scenes Showing Them Together.
3) Darkness
This is related to point number one/Andrés, but every time I read the words "darkest, darker, dark box" in relation to Andrés powers, I wanted to take a shot but then I would have blacked out. It was stupid, and this is why: what about that part of his heritage is so much worse than his Titi's? How can he see what his grandmother did and also help her and ALSO do the work when he grows up but when it comes to this other side he "promised to never unlock the dark box." We never find out WHY it is. We never even find out if he had tried it before and something bad happened and that's why. We never even find out what exactly it does. In the climax, he finally opens the box and grabs some rainclouds and brings them down to put out the fire over San Isidro, but his grandmother literally could do that as well so how is it so different? It just makes no sense.
4) Romance
I know that attraction is a big part of romance, but I'm so over the whole "I saw them and fell in love at first sight because they are so attractive/I knew they were different." I Am Once Again Asking WHY. What is it about them that makes you feel this way?
5)Beatriz
This could be part of the second point but I had to make it standalone because it really made the things that annoyed me in this book annoy me more. In this interview: https://www.thebigthrill.org/2022/05/..., Cañas speaks about how the main character in Rebecca was passive and she wrote Beatriz specifically in conversation with her, that she wanted the climax of this book to be about Beatriz taking more initiative, that she "push[ed] back," "fought tooth and nail." That is Not What Happened. Beatriz spent the book going from "I Can't Sleep In This House Alone Without Rodolfo Here" to "I Can't Sleep In This House Alone Without Andrés Here." And in between that she would make comments about how She Didn't Marry For Love, She Married For Comfort, She Wanted A Home That Was Hers, She Is A FeministTM. Something that's really annoying about modern retellings or books that's written in conversation with other books is that in the retelling they take out everything that made the original fun or interesting and also somehow manage to it less feminist. Like how is this more feminist? Because she says she married for Political Reasons instead of for love? How is it more feminist when she spends the whole climax tied up about to burn to death and the man is the one that saves her? How is it more feminist that she spends more time talking to Andrés than any of the women who she is supposed to have tension with? How is it more feminist if we never find out what any of these women want? If they never even have a damn personality?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 25, 2022
Meh. Good creep factor, but I don't know. I was expecting more I guess.
February 7, 2022
The Haunting of Hill House meets Rebecca in the debut novel from Isabel Cañas – The Hacienda was a wonderfully gothic horror, and genuinely historically interesting as well. It’s an incredibly impressive debut – taut and suspenseful, but with a real meatiness to the story that gives it depth.
Set in a Mexico still firmly overshadowed by the War for Independence, The Hacienda introduces us to Beatriz, who lost her father in the aftermath and sets out to find a husband able to save herself and her mother from an existence dependent on the meagre kindness of what family she has left. She meets Don Rodolfo Eligio Solórzano Ibarra at a ball, falls in love with the stories of his family’s hacienda and the freedom his status offers her, marries – and begins her own version of a classic Gothic Horror.
Fans of the genre will be used to certain tropes, and Isabel Cañas does an excellent job of writing within it, but allowing herself the freedom to make it her own. There’s no swooning heroines to be found here – Beatriz is willing to meet society’s expectations up to a point, and this woman is a survivor to the core. Rather than submitting to a slow descent into madness, or peril, she acknowledges and refuses to accept the first stages of a home that seems determinedly out to get her. Laughter and whispers in the night? Cold patches of the home and visions of nightmare apparitions? Unacceptable! Beatriz takes action – and it’s so engaging to see a heroine with that kind of backbone.
That doesn’t lessen the scares, you’ll be pleased to hear. Beatriz may be willing to face down the supernatural head on, but this is a hacienda with an axe to grind, and it’s just as ready for a fight as she is. Matters escalate, and quickly – and it’s not just the supernatural entities you have to watch out for, because more than one of the perfectly mundane humans have dark agendas of their own.
If you love the Gothic Horror genre but are keen to see a heroine with more agency and a story with plenty of bite, The Hacienda just might be what you’ve been looking for.
This review first appeared at mysteryandsuspense.com.
Set in a Mexico still firmly overshadowed by the War for Independence, The Hacienda introduces us to Beatriz, who lost her father in the aftermath and sets out to find a husband able to save herself and her mother from an existence dependent on the meagre kindness of what family she has left. She meets Don Rodolfo Eligio Solórzano Ibarra at a ball, falls in love with the stories of his family’s hacienda and the freedom his status offers her, marries – and begins her own version of a classic Gothic Horror.
Fans of the genre will be used to certain tropes, and Isabel Cañas does an excellent job of writing within it, but allowing herself the freedom to make it her own. There’s no swooning heroines to be found here – Beatriz is willing to meet society’s expectations up to a point, and this woman is a survivor to the core. Rather than submitting to a slow descent into madness, or peril, she acknowledges and refuses to accept the first stages of a home that seems determinedly out to get her. Laughter and whispers in the night? Cold patches of the home and visions of nightmare apparitions? Unacceptable! Beatriz takes action – and it’s so engaging to see a heroine with that kind of backbone.
That doesn’t lessen the scares, you’ll be pleased to hear. Beatriz may be willing to face down the supernatural head on, but this is a hacienda with an axe to grind, and it’s just as ready for a fight as she is. Matters escalate, and quickly – and it’s not just the supernatural entities you have to watch out for, because more than one of the perfectly mundane humans have dark agendas of their own.
If you love the Gothic Horror genre but are keen to see a heroine with more agency and a story with plenty of bite, The Hacienda just might be what you’ve been looking for.
This review first appeared at mysteryandsuspense.com.
December 4, 2022
This book was okay. Nothing too exciting or memorable. I feel like the beginning to middle dragged so much it really put me off of the book. It does get better towards the end, hence the 3 stars. This isn't something I'd re-read or recommend unless someone was into a slow burner.
August 17, 2022
A unique twist on the classic gothic drama. Filled with cultural lore and creeping dread, the Hacienda is a dark and compelling adventure into injustice, power struggles, and mysticism.
July 13, 2022
have you ever read a book so boring that you become cranky? that's how i feel right now.
i was super excited for this one but wooow it was slow. definitely gives off Mexican Gothic vibes like people are saying but i didn't care for that one either so i should have known. i only have myself to blame. i'm disappointed
i was super excited for this one but wooow it was slow. definitely gives off Mexican Gothic vibes like people are saying but i didn't care for that one either so i should have known. i only have myself to blame. i'm disappointed
June 26, 2022
During the first 30% of this book I felt like dnf'ing this book 20 times. It was so slow, very sad as I was really looking forward to it. It did pick up a bit and there were some really creepy moments. I just did not enjoy it as much as wished I would.
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