MEMORIES OF LUCINDA ECO wears its paranormal elements on its sleeve. Set in Mexico, the YA novel flits between 1960s Baja and the present day—telling the story of the titular protagonist, whose grandmother falls under a curse following a fatal altercation with a local gang boss: the repulsive and creepy El Jaguar. Switching between two timeframes—that of Lucinda’s grandmother Herminia’s youth in the 1960s (during which she learned brujería, the type of supernatural witchcraft peculiar to Latin America) and the present day (which sees Lucinda doing the same thing and venturing to “the Beyond”)—the narrative develops clearly and steadily.
Author Scott T. Barnes has an ear for natural-sounding dialogue, and the eye frequently snags on an arresting metaphor or simile, such as El Jaguar being described as a feature of Lucinda’s hometown, “like the mole under your eye.” The narrative is quite adult at times, with an unflinching attitude towards blood and the exigencies of modern living, like sex work and drug-taking.
If MEMORIES OF LUCINDA ECO has a fault, it is that it tries to do too much: Spanning 50 years, and covering all of the tumultuous changes that have shaped modern-day Mexico, would be a tough task for a book twice as long. Barnes makes a clean breast of it, but on occasion the narrative needs a little more explication, as with the concept of allies. Introduced on the fly in the conversation between two key characters early on, the term is then bandied about before an explanation (and indeed a typology of allies) appears on page 80. Readers used to fiction on witchcraft in early modern European contexts will have inferred prior to this point that an ally is somewhat akin to the concept of a familiar—a sort of spirit that manifests as an animal to do the owner’s bidding—but the lack of clarity in the interim is discomforting, and would be a trivial matter to remedy. There are also two typos—the character Herminia becomes “Hermina” on pages 238 and 252—though the book is excellently formatted otherwise.
Such quibbles aside, MEMORIES OF LUCINDA ECO is a fascinating, slow-burning adventure that will hold undeniable appeal for readers with a penchant for supernatural fiction with a twist.
Set in Baja, California, MEMORIES OF LUCINDA ECO by Scott T. Barnes offers an interesting, heady take on the supernatural YA genre.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader
