I meant to review Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow soon after finishing it, but alas, here I am over a month later, so I'll have to keep it short. This was a lot of fun. I love the Mayan gods and the setting in early 20th century Mexico.
The main character felt sort of like a "rough draft" of the main characters of Moreno-Garcia's later books like Mexican Gothic or The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Not that that's a bad thing by any means: this one is perfectly fine, it's just that the later ones are a bit more polished. I see why some people think this felt a bit YA-like, but that may just be due to the protagonist's age more than the writing and topics.
The Maya stuff for me was the highlight, especially how this tied into the main character's identity in 20th century Yucatán. I don't remember the novel getting too much into Mesoamerican philosophical ideas about time, but it maybe did get a bit into theories of identity: at least for the gods in this novel, identity is not a singular, temporally bound thing, and identities can be instantiated across time and space.
Or maybe that's reading a bit too much into it, and this is really just a fun historical urban fantasy spin on some stories from the Popol Vuh? Either way, this is maybe not Moreno-Garcia's best novel, but it's pretty good and I always love a chance to delve into Maya stuff.
See also my Goodreads review.
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