The Mirror Season is a stunning, devastating book. Big huge trigger warning for graphic sexual assault. But it's such an incredibly healing, affirming, cathartic, book. I can't possibly recommend or not recommend it to anyone, since I don't have that trauma in my life to deal with. But I can say that she deals with it gently and ruthlessly, like a nurse picking broken glass out of a wound.
The writing is gorgeous. If you've read McLemore before you know her prose is vibrant and lyrical. In this book I think she is a little more spare, more precise. Every word exactly the right one in the right place. In her previous books I've enjoyed the colour and depth magic realism brings to her stories, but the connections, the metaphors didn't always land for me. In this one, metaphor and magic realism and allusions to The Snow Queen interweave so brilliantly to illuminate her themes and characters that when I wasn't sobbing about what was happening on the page I was crying with how beautifully it was all coming together.
Probably the best book I've read all year. I love Ciela and Lock with all the pieces of my broken heart.
Also, I need to find a pastelería so I can try pan dulce in all its delicious-sounding variations! And I looked up a recipe for cazuela, and that's what we're having for dinner tonight (except I don't have any of the right spices or chilies, so it will be a pale imitation).
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