Zoraida Córdova, "The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina"

Zoraida Córdova has had an interesting career. Born in Ecuador, she moved to New York as a young child and grew up bilingual. After the usual writing workshops and so on she published a raft of young adult novels and silly romances. She made her first real money with a series on the "Brooklyn Brujas," which wikipedia describes as "a Latinx version of Charmed." She wrote a Star Wars story for a collection, and that led to her getting hired to write two Star Wars novels. She branched out by writing, under a pseudonym, a series of romance novels about male strippers finding true love.

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (2021) seems to be her attempt to get beyond all of that and create something more adult and serious. I liked it. It is certainly the best example I know of explicitly Hispanic American fantasy. It blends Latin magical realism with Anglo fantasy, European fairy tales, and a creepy circus story, and I enjoyed the result.

What if there were a family that was a story? In which everything that happened was driven by the unfolding of a plot, in which everyone simply accepts that they are characters something is toying with, settling into the strange current that sweeps them along toward a frightening climax and a new state of being? You may be thinking, wait, John, all families in novels are like that. But the descendants of Orquídea Montoya are more like that. When this works, it is amazing. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina has a lot of problems that keep me from calling it great, but it does the thing that seizes my heart: it makes magic feel magical. There were moments, listening to this, when I had to stop the audio and marvel at what I had just experienced. There were also long stretches I found irritating, but I will read a lot to get to a page of magic that transcends the mundane world.

Orquídea Montoya is a witch from Ecuador who flees (something) to the US, building a sort of magical fortress in the New Mexican desert. She had five husbands and a number of children I lost track of, and at the start of the book she announces that she is dying and summons her descendants to her home to receive their bequests. Her strange passing (death? transformation? something else?) weakens her magical protections and the things that hunted her can now reach her family. Chapters on Orquídea's life alternate with the story of her puzzled descendants. I liked Orquídea's story much better, and found the lives of the 21st century Montoyas mostly dreary or predictable. But the climax is interesting and has those moments of real magic I mentioned. If I were a star-giving sort of reviewer I would probably give this four out of five.