What’s the book? The Possession of Alba Diaz by Isabel Cañas
How dark is it? Medium dark, like a mine entrance.
How good is it? 4/10 dark spirits
Mexico, 1765. Alba Diaz is rich and of marrying age. This is good, yes? No. This is more of a “marriage as business deal” time and place and Alba is terrified of ending up with some creepy old dude with a booming silver mine. So she makes a deal with her friend Carlos; he’s around her age, attractive, and has as little interest in marrying as Alba does. They agree to marry, forging their own business alliance before a much less pleasant one can be forced on either of them. So far, so good.
Then, two things happen. First, Alba meets Carlos’s magnetically sexy cousin Elias. Second, a plague hits. (The Matlazahuatl they describe was a real plague that swept through colonial Mexico several times in this era. It sounds terrifying.)
And here I must digress for a moment, because part of this story is told from Elias’s point of view. Elias grew up in Spain while his father worked here in Mexico at the family silver mine. While his father remarried a local and had another kid here in Mexico, Elias and his mother did not have a great time back in Spain. He’s pretty bitter about it. He has a checkered past, including a stint doing forced labor in a Spanish mine and some time in Constantinople studying alchemy and the occult. His alchemist buddies gave him a bunch of money and sent him to Spain to buy mercury for their experiments, and he does just that. But he also finds out his estranged father has died and Elias is more or less expected to take that mercury to Mexico and use his mad mercury skills to pay of his father’s debts. (They don’t explain it much, but mercury was key to refining the silver out of the ore they were mining.) He’s pretty pissed about the whole thing; the only silver lining (hah!) is the amazing gal he meets at a party cousin Carlos drags him to. The amazing gal is, of course, Alba.
Okay, back to the plague. Alba convinces her parents to move up to Carlos’s family silver mine until the plague burns itself out; they can ride out the plague safely up in the mountains while also finalizing the details of Alba’s impending marriage. The big downside is that sexy tempting Elias is coming, too, since he came to Mexico to work in that exact mine. Since he’s part of Carlos’s family, she can’t entirely avoid him. She also has to hang out with Carlos’s best friend, Bartolome, a soldier-turned-priest who wants to win Mexico for the Inquisition or something. Alba thinks he’s creepy but she’s also very religious so she feels guilty for thinking he’s creepy.
It’s here, up at the silver mine, that Alba becomes very clearly possessed by an evil entity. As her symptoms worsen, she doesn’t know who to turn to. Bartolome represents God and the church, so he’s an obvious choice, but Alba doesn’t quite trust him. Elias has some experience with the occult and Alba does trust him (turns out Elias is a pretty nice guy) but the book he’s using to help is, as far as they both can tell, evil. It’s a puzzle.
Things get worse and worse as Bartolome and Elias approach the problem from opposite angles. Eventually Bartolome involves the Inquisition and blames the whole possession on Elias’s sorcery. Things are not looking good for either Alba or Elias.
Alba is a sympathetic character, Elias is interesting, Bartolome makes a good villain, and the possessing entity itself is quite intriguing. I was excited to be along for the ride as the book got more violent and mysterious.
It chugged along and kept me interested right to thend, which is both bloody and dramatic. It’s also kind of a happy ending for Alba and Elias.
This is where the book lost me. Without giving away too many details, it felt like too much of a hand-wavey ‘deus ex machina’ situation to me. I love a good happy ending but this book set us up for a heartwrenching tragedy and just reversed it in the last few pages in a way that felt cheap. But right up until then, this was a fairly satisfying read.
Darker Books 