silvia moreno garcia gods of jade and shadow

Each tale was more fascinating than the last, ghouls and djinns, the humans who held them in thrall and those who were held captive by them. Instead, she sliced through her tales, swift and harsh as ax-fall: men lured to their death by beautiful women with hoofed legs, beast-headed widows who dwell among the dead, old women draped in haiks snatching wandering children, and lovers from rivaling tribes doomed to eternal exile in an empty desert. She did not drape them in a silk sheet, did not sweeten the nightmares into dreams. My mother did not rob her stories of their sharp edges. I was a restless child, always floating, unable to settle in my skin but my mother’s storyteller’s cadence could always quiet the world around me into stillness, freeze it. Gods of Jade and Shadow feels told rather than read, and it pulled me back into the memory of the stories my mother used to tell me. In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City-and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld.Īlternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525620754 Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

She opens it-and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.

Silvia moreno garcia gods of jade and shadow