Monday, June 12, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Secret of the Moon Conch by David Bowles and Guadalupe García McCall

 




Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 6, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Secret of the Moon Conch is a new young adult fantasy novel by authors David Bowles and Guadalupe García McCall. The novel contains large elements of historical fantasy and romance, as the story features two protagonists from two different time periods: the year 1521, in which the story follows an Aztec warrior named Calizto during the fall of the Aztec Empire to Cortez and his Spanish invaders and the year 2019, in which the story follows a girl Sitlali as she attempts to flee to her father who abandoned them to head to the United States to escape the attention of gangs in Mexico. Through a magical conch, the two protagonists connect and are able to communicate...and fall in love, as they each struggle with seemingly similar situations, persecution for who they are at the behest of colonial and imperial powers and people who simply are unwilling to acknowledge others as human beings with their own rights to exist.

You'd think such a book would be a bit heavy handed, and it is, and the book is in some ways predictable (and not just because Calizto's history has already happened), but at the same time the story really works. Both main characters are really easy to relate to and have strong deep characters, resulting in them having some rather unpredictable moments, and the thematic parallels between their times work quite well. The romantic chemistry between the two is really well done, and the book closes itself off not with an unrealistically optimistic ending, but also not with a dark cynical and depressing one as well - there's just the right amount of hopefulness alongside the recognition that today's world features some absolute atrocities alongside the southern border...not just in Mexico, but in the US immigration system's treatment of those trying to cross the border for the sake of better lives. It's a short book, but it's packed and not a quick read, and I would definitely recommend it to YA readers


----------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------
In 2019, a teenage girl named Sitlali decides to leave the town in which she was born, Zongolica, in the State of Veracruz, Mexico. Sitlali's father abandoned her mother years ago to go to the States, leaving her only with her mother - who soon wasted away - and her grandmother, who just recently passed away years later. Now Sitlali has nothing but constant harassment from a boy in a gang who insists that she become his and the only escape she can think of is to follow her grandmother's last plan - to head to the States to meet up with her madrina Tomasita (her mother's best friend) who will shelter her as she seeks her father once more. But the journey to the States is treacherous and the boy who wants her will not let her go so easily.

In 1521, a teenage boy named Calizto is one of the warriors who helps defend his Aztec village from the oncoming Spanish Invaders. Calizto has seen countless losses, including his knighted brother and most of his friends and neighbors, and even lost the rest of his family to disease. The only one he has left is the one he can't reveal to anyone openly: Ofirin, a boy brought to Mexico as an African Slave, who escaped captivity and was nursed back to health by Calizto's family...only to have to then nurse Calizto's family as best as he could while they wasted away due to foreign disease. Calizto is desperate to save his people, but the orders coming in from the Aztec leaders only keep putting them all into more and more dire straits.

Both Calizto and Sitlali's paths are changed forever when each discovers a strange Conch filled with magic symbols echoing from the power of the Moon Goddess, which allows them to communicate and interact with each other across time, especially as the moon gets closer to being full. With its power, can the two possibly change history? Or are they doomed to suffer in their own timelines the fates of all those who search for a better life while seemingly unstoppable forces attempt to crush them under their relentless cruelty?
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Secrets of the Moon Conch does the pretty standard YA thing of altering the perspective from which each chapter is told - each chapter switches ostensibly between Sitlali and Calizto's points of view in first person - but because of how the eponymous Conch works to connect the two characters, that perspective switching isn't quite as unambiguous as you'd typically see here, as the Conch melds the two together by the middle of the book. It's a really effective way of telling this story, that allows the book's themes of how the two characters' struggles in two different times really isn' tas dissimilar as we'd like to imagine.

For Calizto, that struggle is of a common non-noble boy from a village of the remaining Aztec Empire trying desperately to hold off foreign imperial invaders who mean to kill off or enslave his entire people. Calizto is kind and well meaning at heart, even holding secret a foreign boy in Ofirin from his own people for fear that those people will kill Ofirin for coming with the invaders, when Ofirin was only there because he was enslaved first from Africa (readers familiar with the history will guess some truths behind Ofirin's backstory before they are revealed, but they make little difference to this point). He's a little blind to the injustices his own people have committed, as one character points out, but this is hardly the time for him to consider that - as his people are on the brink of extermination and genocide at the hands of the Spanish, despite his best efforts. History is seemingly not on his side.

For Sitlali, that struggle is seemingly a more personal one at first, but it's just as existential as Calizto's. To remain in Zongolica is for Sitlali to condemn herself to abuse at the hands of a boy in a gang who thinks that she should become his property, no matter what she wants and what he does...and she has no family or friends who can shelter her from that fate. Her only hope is to make the trek to America, where her mother's good friend - her Madrina - currently lives, and where her father abandoned them all to goto...in hopes that one of them, preferably her father will take her in. It's a deadly dangerous trek just to get to America, but there's no other choice for Sitlali...and once she gets there, she finds that America is in its own way just as dangerous for undocumented peoples like her, with ICE just around hte corner to treat them just as inhumanely as the Spanish did Calizto's people.

And so when the two of them get connected by the Conch, which allows them to hear each other and to connect in other magical ways. And they recognize kindrid spirits in each other, despite the vast differences in their worlds - Calizto's brutal battles and practices, Sitlali's modern technology for example. This allows for their romance to grow naturally and be very very real, and for the relationship to really work on pages. It also allows for the two of them to support each other as things go horribly wrong for both of them. For this is a book that understands that the inhumane practices of immigraiton authorities in the US - ICE and otherwise - as well as people who would rather betray those around them than potentially be made uncomfortable or slightly less safe is just as horrid and unacceptable as what happened to a people on the verge of extinction from a colonizing invader. And this is a book that understands that there are no easy answers to that - so when Sitlali attempts to arouse sentiment on her side by going viral, the book knows that this is hardly a solution that would actually work...indeed, if you pay attention to our sadly non-magical real world, it hasn't even when similar things have happened here.

And yet, through Sitlali and Calizto's good heartedness and courage, the book still possesses a hopeful optimism that justice can prevail, and that something can be done...and that a better future may be out there. And so while the way for Sitlali and Calizto to have a happy ending might be magical, the book suggests that a hopeful future might not be, and the book really works as a result. A very good YA novel that is well worth anyone's time.

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