Review: Getting Spellbound by Cynthia Gómez's Muñeca

Cynthia Gómez’s debut novel Muñeca is due to hit shelves this June. Having read her prior short story collection, The Nightmare Box and Other Stories from Cursed Morsels, as well as her earlier novelette, The Shivering World from Dread Stone’s Split Scream (later, Tenebrous), I was thrilled to get my hands on this one. Told through the traditions of magical realism, the novel is a passionate queer romance that seamlessly blends horror, history, and music.

Nati is good at spells, at least for a beginner. Some might call her a witch, though that is not the term she nor the now-estranged grandmother who passed these skills onto her would call themselves. As she narrates the introduction, we learn she’s recently lost her mother and is living in Oakland with her friend and coworker Doris while working as an accountant in the late 1960s. They enjoy a good life in Oakland’s underground queer community and are free to be themselves with each other outside of work, where Nati relies on Doris for dealing with her male chauvinist coworkers. There’s a lot of code switching happening here from work, to family, to friends.

Then there’s Violeta, the mysteriously paralyzed heiress of the Miramontes and Guzmán de Torrijos family fortunes. Nati is familiar with the Miramontes’s mansion as her mother worked for the family while raising Nati. Gossip of Violeta’s condition makes it to Nati, and given her history with the occult, she suspects the ailment isn’t physical, and in that smells a healthy paycheck if she can break the spell. At least this is the story she tells herself. Meeting Violeta, only able to communicate secretly through blinking, confirms Nati’s suspicions that magic is responsible for the young woman’s condition and that the Miramontes family is responsible for her infirmity. Violeta is an object to both her husband and her mother, who goes along with the borderline arranged marriage and her son-in-law’s leadership for her family legacy and money.

Gómez writes with a tender voice; the pages stained with emotional residue you can taste and smell. Every feeling is tethered to something corporeal, often within the body. Longing is woven through much of this novel as Nati falls deeper in love with Violeta. The music cited in this book was a delight. I found myself tempted to craft a playlist as I happen to know a ten-month-old who also can’t get enough of Carla Thomas, Ottis Retting, Aretha Franklin, and the Everly Brothers. Music isn’t just symbolic in Muñeca; it’s crucial to the rituals Nati and her grandmother performed. Gómez makes great use of music as a device to modulate the level of intimacy throughout. As Nati shares music with Violeta, so too does she share increasingly more secret parts of herself.

The power dynamic between them, Nati able-bodied and in control, the only one capable of finding a cure, and Violeta helpless, robbed of her agency, has the potential to devolve into a toxic dynamic. I was very happy that what’s presented is a considerate interplay of two women who view each other as equals. Their relationship grows slowly, probing the boundaries of their own distrust until they finally find themselves on near level footing. What’s on the page feels honest and tender. Their love refuses to impose or demand, even when it’s difficult or goes against what the other might truly want.

Oakland, CA, a favored setting for Gómez, provides the backdrop for brief portions of this novel before it relocates to Orinda, the site of the Miramontes mansion. Like Gómez’s other works set in the surrounding region, history is a compass.

The horror elements in Muñeca are never far from the surface, from the mystery of why Nati does not speak with her grandmother anymore, to the delightfully grim final showdown, Nati and Violeta are both tinged with a darkness that Nati tries to push away, but Violeta, with nothing to lose, leans in. Embracing this darkness could be their salvation, which is interesting because a similar darkness lurks within the Mirmontes/Guzmán de Torrijos family. How many things are considered wrong that are only wrong when people without privilege do them? While the book never points to this use of magic as a double standard, I couldn’t help but notice Nati holding back until the final confrontation.

The first line of the book telegraphs the themes of the novel beautifully, “… to certain people, you will always be invisible. They won’t see you. They won’t see your gifts. That is not your problem, nor is it your excuse.” Nati is working class, queer, and Latinx. Violeta is severely disabled, and both she and her mother, despite their wealth, are still subject to the abuses of a patriarchal system (it was the 1960s).

The women of this novel are underestimated and in that find an advantage. For Nati and Violeta, love is their liberator. I find myself resisting the temptation to give too much away, but the title is better appreciated once you’ve read it. What I found salient and wonderfully executed here was the way Gómez intertwines these women’s struggles. Ableism, homophobia, sexism, racism; much of contemporary fiction, in my experience, might clumsily comment on two or more forms of oppression but treats them as if they’re completely separated rather than the same struggle against white patriarchal capitalism. Mrs. Miramontes might be the matriarch of the family, but that comes with a certain set of rules. She’s still controlled by the men in her family, both dead and living. Going back over, I’m struck by the way the second chapter begins with Nati noticing all the men watching her in the Miramontes home, she’s talking about the family portraits that line the walls, Andrés is the only man with presence in the novel, and he spends much of it at a distance, with Violeta’s mother doing much of his bidding.

Reading Muñeca, I was also struck by how wonderful a pairing romance and horror make, because it’s impossible to say how things will work out. Does it lean romance and deliver a happy ending? Does it switch horror and land on tragedy? I already know, but the only way you can find out is by buying and reading the book. All I will say is it’s satisfying.

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Muñeca hits shelves June 2nd from Penguin. As always, below are links to purchase from local independent booksellers in St. Louis that Nocturne is not affiliated with but firmly believes deserve your loving patronage.

I received an uncorrected proof from Net Galley in exchange for honest feedback. All quotes should be considered inaccurate until checked against the final version.