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Mar. 6th, 2022 10:09 pmThe Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was our most recent book club book, which I forgot to start reading until 24 hours before the book club; as a result, please take all opinions below with several grains from the salt-shaker marked 'Read Very Quickly, Little Time To Digest.'
That said, I found much of the book extremely digestible and it was not at all a hardship to read quickly! The first half of the book is very enjoyable foray into the sub-genre of magical realist multigenerational family sagas: when the titular Orquídea Divina finds herself at the end of her life, she summons all of her numerous descendants home from their various normal lives to her magically-protected small-town mansion, where they are confronted with a certain amount of hereditary weirdness, given the opportunity to make a wish for their future, and learn that they are likely to be targeted by some kind of danger or curse. I liked the cousins who are the most protagonist-y of the descendants, I liked the variety and complexity of the family relationships and the messy relationship with a mysterious and closed-off magical grandmother, and I liked the way the author navigated the tone-shifts between the more lyrical magical realism of Orquídea's world and narrative and the more grounded and contemporary perspectives of the modern POV characters. It was all tremendously readable and I would have been happy to stay in that fraught family reunion for another several hundred pages.
But the family reunion does eventually end, after which there is a time-skip followed by some more dramatical events and targeted investigations into Orquídea's magical/tragical past. Somewhat to my surprise, this left me feeling a little let down; it's not often I look at a book and I'm like "I would like you to have less plot, actually," but I was really enjoying the book about a family trying to lead different kinds of lives while retaining a connection to each other and their weird family magical inheritance! Once the back half developed High Stakes and Magical Peril it felt to me a bit like it started to hyperfocus on Resolution For And About Orquídea in a way that flattened the trajectories of everyone else.
However, I will say I could not predict a lot of the back-half developments so at least there waas the element of surprise!
( Confused spoilers )
That said, I found much of the book extremely digestible and it was not at all a hardship to read quickly! The first half of the book is very enjoyable foray into the sub-genre of magical realist multigenerational family sagas: when the titular Orquídea Divina finds herself at the end of her life, she summons all of her numerous descendants home from their various normal lives to her magically-protected small-town mansion, where they are confronted with a certain amount of hereditary weirdness, given the opportunity to make a wish for their future, and learn that they are likely to be targeted by some kind of danger or curse. I liked the cousins who are the most protagonist-y of the descendants, I liked the variety and complexity of the family relationships and the messy relationship with a mysterious and closed-off magical grandmother, and I liked the way the author navigated the tone-shifts between the more lyrical magical realism of Orquídea's world and narrative and the more grounded and contemporary perspectives of the modern POV characters. It was all tremendously readable and I would have been happy to stay in that fraught family reunion for another several hundred pages.
But the family reunion does eventually end, after which there is a time-skip followed by some more dramatical events and targeted investigations into Orquídea's magical/tragical past. Somewhat to my surprise, this left me feeling a little let down; it's not often I look at a book and I'm like "I would like you to have less plot, actually," but I was really enjoying the book about a family trying to lead different kinds of lives while retaining a connection to each other and their weird family magical inheritance! Once the back half developed High Stakes and Magical Peril it felt to me a bit like it started to hyperfocus on Resolution For And About Orquídea in a way that flattened the trajectories of everyone else.
However, I will say I could not predict a lot of the back-half developments so at least there waas the element of surprise!
( Confused spoilers )
