Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I read a review that called this book a cross between Jane Eyre and Dracula, and that pretty much sums it up. It is a gothic version of Get Out! (which apparently is based on an Edgar Allen Poe story). The story is eerie, gut wrenching, mysterious, paranoid, edge of seat escape story, and by the end I found myself sorry to see it go. Noemí Taboadais a beautiful if slightly annoying socialite given to wearing luscious full-skirted purple gowns and good furs. Glittering as she is, however, Noemí harbors ambitions to attend the National University for a masters in anthropology. Of course, her parents object. But, one night her father summons her home early from a party to offer her a deal, go check on what is going on with your cousin Carolina, who married into a reclusive (and racist) Anglo family, and wrote a strange paranoid letter home and he will send her to college. So off she goes. I did not know that gothic stories have an element of social criticism, which in the two books that I have read by this author checks out with her subtext. This is set in 1950's Mexico, where women cannot vote and once married, belong to their husbands like property. Noemí deserves better. As do all women.