Review: Itzá
Rios de la Luz
143 pages
Broken River Books (2017)
Read this if you like: Isabel Allende, V. Castro, Arundhati Roy
tl;dr summary: A pair of sisters in a magical family navigate the grief of losing their Abuelita, grow up
There’s this ephemeral feel to a well-crafted magical realist world. It’s a kind of confidence—the world owns its strangeness to such an extent that you can’t imagine it existing any other way. The first page of Itzá does this beautifully. It opens on the death of the family matriarch, Abuelita Araceli, on a bed that has inexplicably moved into the middle of the forest, a four-day drive from the family home. As we delve deeper into the history of this family, we learn where this magic comes from: they are water witches, or so says Abuelita. This is a background thread throughout the story, a burst of something strange and wonderful to brighten the darker edges of the narrative.
And it needs that bit of brightness, because the underlying narrative happening here is pretty bleak. Marisol and Araceli’s step-father is abusive, their mother emotionally unstable; once Abuela and Abuelita die, they lose their protection, until Marisol is forced to flee to her Tía Lucia in Denver. At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story about finding your own strength through tragedy, woven through with themes of racism, identity, and what it means to find a home when your ancestry stretches across borders. All of these themes come across effectively without feeling heavy handed, thanks in large part to the more mystical, fantastical elements. Because it uses the sparkling and surreal, it is able to convey a bleak reality without it overwhelming the reader.
The characters are another strength of this novel, particularly the character of Abuelita. While she’s technically dead for the entire book, the reader gets to see her in flashback moments—and she’s an effing delight. Like her assertion that “TV is not bad for you in the afterlife”, and her wish that her great-granddaughters bury a TV for her after she dies so she can watch her stories. Abuela Rubí is equally vibrant but in a different way, a character who is a force of nature—who wanders the neighborhood at night in a goblin mask, who would volunteer at the border and gather the things left behind by people as they crossed the desert.
I was also intrigued by the use of voice. The book is divided into very small sections, regularly switching between first, second, and third person as it moves between them. I was concerned at first that this would be jarring but I found the transitions fairly smooth, and only had a few moments where I had to stop and reacclimate myself to whose perspective I was sharing. This floating between POVs enhances the dreamy feel of the narrative, and expands the scope for the reader, too—we get glimpses inside Marisol’s head but we aren’t locked there; we can venture into the thoughts of other characters, or sometimes zoom in and take a place within the narrative when it lapses into second person. I appreciate books that experiment with new ways to approach voice and perspective, and Itzá does this artfully and effectively, in a way that enhances the story and works with its natural rhythms.
A book that switches voice, using such small chapters, could easily read as fragmented or disjointed, but Itzá avoids that trap. I think the main way it does this is through the beauty of the language, which is consistent across sections and voices. I started going through to pull out lines I loved and realized I was flagging half the pages. The imagery and descriptive language in this book are on point, and I’d definitely recommend this as an example of how to write poetic prose without it reading flowery or melodramatic—it skirts that line beautifully throughout.
I also appreciate that this book is novella-length, because it being that short made me feel justified in lingering over it—and it’s definitely a story that is worth spending time digging into. Sometimes I would get to the end of a section and realize I’d been completely focused on the lyricism of the language, without really absorbing what had actually happened, and need to go back and give it a second pass. I also found myself flipping back and forth, catching new details that I’d missed the first time or weaving them together in new ways. Front to back, this is a multi-layered, deftly-constructed story that still manages to read as effortless and that alone makes it worth a read, in my book, particularly for lyrical or magical realist writers.
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