Anna, Julia, and Marion have reunited at their neglected childhood home in Madrid, Spain. The lingering bad memories and creepiness of the place since their father’s death have led Julia to hire a
santera to clean the energy of the house, despite her sisters’ skepticism about the supernatural cleansing with its strange rituals. As the rituals progress, the sisters are forced to face the hurts of their past, the result of their Spanish mother dying young and the girls being left with their cruel English father. He had wanted his wealthy, educated daughters to marry well with men of his choosing, but Marion fell in love with a bullfighter, Julia with a woman, and Anna with her father’s business partner. When they wouldn’t defer to him, their father set out to remove their lovers in harsh, sometimes fatal ways, causing lasting damage to all of their relationships.
VERDICT Herself born in Spain to a Spanish mother and English father, Aikin offers her second English-language novel (after We Shall See the Sky Sparkling). Her visceral writing effectively evokes the Spanish setting, but even with the hopeful ending the melancholy characters and their experiences make for dark reading.
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