Summer of the Mariposas
Jan. 24th, 2013 20:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyMcCall, Guadalupe Garcia. Summer of the Mariposas. New York: Tu Books, 2012.
McCall is one of the Guests of Honor at Sirens 2013, which is going to be awesome--you should come!--so when I saw this book at the Strand I snapped it right up. I enjoyed it, but I also had some quibbles.
The book is billed as a Mexican-American fantasy retelling of the Odyssey, and in this case, the marketing didn't lie. The book follows Odilia and her four sisters in their quest to return a body they find in the Rio Grande to the man's family in Mexico and then to their grandmother's house and back again; along the way they are guided by La Llorona and face down a parlianment of lechuzas and the chupacabras, among others. The book was a page-turner, and I enjoyed the sisterhood among the characters very much. The book is definitely a gripping read--I was tearing through it even as my internal complaints accumulated, and I really did enjoy the portrait McCall drew of a family that straddles cultures and borders, and the way McCall fearlessly combined the elements of her stories into a new thing that is all its own.
At some point I decided to suspend my disbelief (it helps that Odilia is helped by a magical jade pendant) about the plausibility of certain aspects of the plot, which was a good decision. McCall's La Llorona is not a villain but a misunderstood mother--she is in fact La Malinche, aka Malintzin--and my problems with the book centered around this aspect of it. At one point the narrative directly describes her as an "Aztec princess," and the narrative also romanticizes pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan and Aztec society in a way that I found questionable on a number of fronts, principally that they are inaccurate and unrepresentative. La Malinche certainly wasn't an "Aztec princess", if such a thing ever even existed--the "tzin" honorific matches the "Doña" that the Spaniards referred to her by, but the best evidence available is that she was born to a commoner family of no distinction in a frontier region between the Maya states and the Triple Alliance. I also think that representing Aztec society as a bunch of flower-children in harmony with the earth does fundamental injustice to their incredibly complex and sophisticated culture and beliefs. Perhaps this is just because I've read Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood novels, but trying to talk about Aztec mythology while ignoring its fundamental precept that the gods are dead and the universe is sustained by daily offerings of human blood seems to me to be a disservice.
I was also, honestly, a little surprised at my own reaction to the "a mother's love is all-powerful forever" pabulum espoused at the end of the book. I don't even have to think to come up with a long list of people I know who can personally attest that no, maternal love doesn't fix everything, isn't forever, isn't guaranteed, doesn't guarantee that the mother-daughter relationship will be sunshine and kittens and roses, because it doesn't, and even unconditional love can be emotionally abusive. I suppose I'd rather have this ideology than "mothers are evil" or something of the sort, but it stuck in my craw because it struck close to home. I wish the ending had been more about sisterhood, really. And I also wish that the final denouement hadn't re-hitched Odilia's mother to a man. It is possible to get along in life without them, though no one seems to want to give the sisters' mother credit for doing just that.
McCall is one of the Guests of Honor at Sirens 2013, which is going to be awesome--you should come!--so when I saw this book at the Strand I snapped it right up. I enjoyed it, but I also had some quibbles.
The book is billed as a Mexican-American fantasy retelling of the Odyssey, and in this case, the marketing didn't lie. The book follows Odilia and her four sisters in their quest to return a body they find in the Rio Grande to the man's family in Mexico and then to their grandmother's house and back again; along the way they are guided by La Llorona and face down a parlianment of lechuzas and the chupacabras, among others. The book was a page-turner, and I enjoyed the sisterhood among the characters very much. The book is definitely a gripping read--I was tearing through it even as my internal complaints accumulated, and I really did enjoy the portrait McCall drew of a family that straddles cultures and borders, and the way McCall fearlessly combined the elements of her stories into a new thing that is all its own.
At some point I decided to suspend my disbelief (it helps that Odilia is helped by a magical jade pendant) about the plausibility of certain aspects of the plot, which was a good decision. McCall's La Llorona is not a villain but a misunderstood mother--she is in fact La Malinche, aka Malintzin--and my problems with the book centered around this aspect of it. At one point the narrative directly describes her as an "Aztec princess," and the narrative also romanticizes pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan and Aztec society in a way that I found questionable on a number of fronts, principally that they are inaccurate and unrepresentative. La Malinche certainly wasn't an "Aztec princess", if such a thing ever even existed--the "tzin" honorific matches the "Doña" that the Spaniards referred to her by, but the best evidence available is that she was born to a commoner family of no distinction in a frontier region between the Maya states and the Triple Alliance. I also think that representing Aztec society as a bunch of flower-children in harmony with the earth does fundamental injustice to their incredibly complex and sophisticated culture and beliefs. Perhaps this is just because I've read Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood novels, but trying to talk about Aztec mythology while ignoring its fundamental precept that the gods are dead and the universe is sustained by daily offerings of human blood seems to me to be a disservice.
I was also, honestly, a little surprised at my own reaction to the "a mother's love is all-powerful forever" pabulum espoused at the end of the book. I don't even have to think to come up with a long list of people I know who can personally attest that no, maternal love doesn't fix everything, isn't forever, isn't guaranteed, doesn't guarantee that the mother-daughter relationship will be sunshine and kittens and roses, because it doesn't, and even unconditional love can be emotionally abusive. I suppose I'd rather have this ideology than "mothers are evil" or something of the sort, but it stuck in my craw because it struck close to home. I wish the ending had been more about sisterhood, really. And I also wish that the final denouement hadn't re-hitched Odilia's mother to a man. It is possible to get along in life without them, though no one seems to want to give the sisters' mother credit for doing just that.
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Date: 2013-10-14 22:24 (UTC)