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Mar. 6th, 2022 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe 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!
Everyone was very chill about one character's boring husband getting some kind of Biblical plague and tragically exploding in locusts ...
Also, a.) I did not particularly expect the magic to be explained but b.) if the magic was going to be explained I did not expect it to be 'Orquidea stole it from a sparkly star alien'.
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!
Everyone was very chill about one character's boring husband getting some kind of Biblical plague and tragically exploding in locusts ...
Also, a.) I did not particularly expect the magic to be explained but b.) if the magic was going to be explained I did not expect it to be 'Orquidea stole it from a sparkly star alien'.
