A young woman sleepwalks into the home of her fiancé’s cousin and tries to kill him. Now what?
As much as I love paranormal fiction, demonic possession isn’t normally something I enjoy. I’ve never seen The Exorcist and I’ve never felt the need to.
I would have skipped this one if it weren’t for the fact that I loved Isabel Cañas’s other two books and was dying for some new fiction from her.
I loved it.
As with all of Cañas’s fiction, there’s always so much more going on in the book than the demonic possession.
First, there’s the romance, and it’s not between Alba and her fiancé. It’s between Alba and her fiancé’s cousin, Elías, a convicted murderer she’s told can only bring trouble.
He just happens to have a whole lot of quicksilver, which they need to refine the silver they harvest from their silver mine. So, they talk down to him, verbally abuse him, and warn others to stay away from him. But none of that stops them from using him to make themselves even richer.
Alba and her fiancé, Carlos, are under no illusions about the nature of their relationship. They’ve been friends since childhood and Alba doesn’t want to take her chances on the marriage market — her chances are not good as a woman in 18th century Mexico whose parents are wealthy, but in debt.
She just wants to sit at home and embroider, and she knows her best chance of that is to marry Carlos. So she takes her fate in her own hands and makes it happen.
Given how determined she is to have a say in how her life turns out, you can understand how frustrated, infuriated, and terrified she is when she realizes a demon occasionally takes control of her body and murders people.
Alba doesn’t know where to turn. She’s heard too many stories of women accused of madness and/or demonic possession who have been locked away, never to be seen or heard from again, and she’s determined not to join their ranks.
It’s not hard to see the similarities between demonic possession and sexual assault, a theme underlined by allusions to Alba’s own experience with assault, as well as the revelation that she is the product of a rape.
But Cañas seems to want to have it both ways. At the end, the demon becomes a symbol of female rage as Alba harnesses it to take revenge on everyone who has wronged her.
SPOILER ALERT 🚨
The following section contains a pretty big spoiler, so consider yourself warned.
Elías dies, but not really?
I would have been OK with the demon hopping from Alba’s body to Elías’s corpse and thereby bringing him back to life.
Instead, Cañas makes a point of saying Elías has been stabbed in the heart. Then Alba describes what it was like to watch the life leave his eyes.
But, instead of a magical recovery, we’re meant to believe he never really died and that his half sister just happened to find him in time to nurse him back to health?
Nope, not buying it.
Other than that, I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it, even if demonic possession isn’t your thing.