'Gods Of Jade And Shadow' Spins A Dark, Dazzling Fairy Tale
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's novel is set in an alternate Jazz Age Mexico, where gods and monsters from Mayan mythology walk the Earth and war with each other for dominion over Xibalba, the land of death.
Novelist and NPR contributor Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new fantasy, , is at its witty, compelling, and merciless best when it is fully rooted in its setting, a perfectly organic combination of 1920s Jazz Age Mexico and the Mayan mythological text, the . The plot of the book is simple: A young woman, Casiopeia Tun, is suffering Cinderella-esque deprivation in the house of her grandfather, a wealthy rural landholder in the Yucatán. She stumbles upon a locked chest containing (most of) the dismembered
