The Hacienda

I'll admit, I had my reservations about The Hacienda early on.

Earlier on in the book it felt like it was going in a very well-trodden direction that I'm just not super into. Seeing taglines like “Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca” sets a stage, which perhaps makes perfect sense considering the material, but also makes the earlier parts of the book seem almost rote and overly indebted to said works.

That is, before Andres becomes an important character in the book. The interplay between Beatriz and Andres is crucial framework here. A lot of authors do the thing where one character knows all the answers the other is searching for, only for us to inhabit their heads without ever an inclination of what these may be. Cañas avoids this masterfully by introducing Andres later in the book and keeping him engaged in the ‘now' of the action.

By the time he's forced to reckon with the past and analyze it himself, it feels natural and earned, as opposed to obfuscated through narrative trickery. That's not easy to pull off and most authors fail at this.

It's a genuine treat to watch everything unspool, the characters interact and how complicated everything is both in Mexico at the time and in the lives of these characters thanks to European colonizers and their own histories.