Soaked in the Mexican-American Rio Grand Valley culture of the 1970s, R.R. Charles’ FEMINISIM, ORANGES, AND WITCHCRAFT spins a bloody, grim tale of vengeance, supernatural powers, and the depraved indifference of greedy racists. In Mexico in the early 20th century, a powerful curandera named Constancia Cuevas stumbles upon an abandoned baby and takes her as her own, naming her Alejandra, who she trains to be an even more powerful witch. They’re happy until they cross paths with a local crime lord, an encounter that leaves Constancia dead and Alejandra the recipient of the old woman’s vajico, the “breath of God” that is the source of their power.
Alejandra flees, but after a brief stint of happiness, she finds herself in Texas illegally as she gives birth to her son. Faced with few choices, she gives him up to adoptive parents and is taken back to Mexico—but she later returns, legally, and moves to the small town in order to keep an eye on him. Her son, Hector, grows up to be an upstanding family man, working hard at the local citrus company to support his family. When the company switches to a cheaper insecticide, Hector’s friends and co-workers—and later dozens of people in town who eat tainted oranges—die horribly, poisoned by what turns out to be an illegal product. The company takes brutal steps to destroy evidence and remove potential witnesses, including hiring the ruthless cartel leader Agosto Morales—a man with a dark secret. Soon the citizens of Welasco are meeting grisly, horrifying ends, and Alejandra must pass her vajico on to a new curandera in order to stop it.
Charles creates a strong universe for his story, and his heroes are likable folks, which makes putting them in danger effective from a story perspective. Three things undermine what could have been a tense story of supernatural revenge, however. Charles structures the book in an odd way, with a lengthy introductory section detailing the back story and the powers of various curanderas, followed by a jump to the 1960s and 1970s that reads like a straight thriller, with almost no supernatural elements at all. While he does bring these aspects back for the violent finale, it feels disjointed. Second, his villains are paper-thin. The white men who prey on Hector and others in town are greedy racists who are given no motivation or purpose in life aside from being greedy and racist, and Morales is simply evil for evil’s sake. We are told that Morales is brilliant, and given a bit of his own back story—but this is the third problem with the story: Exposition. Charles tells us things about characters in blocks of paragraphs, but these character details are promptly forgotten and never demonstrated in their actions or dialogue.
FEMINISIM, ORANGES, AND WITCHCRAFT succeeds in creating a vibrant world filled with great cultural detail, likable characters, and an intriguing premise.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader