"Signal to Noise" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2015)

*A wonderful and personal novel about returning to your childhood home and maybe searching for some of the magic that was once there*

Mexico City, 1988: Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said “I love you” with a mixtape

Moreno-Garcia is the current darling of the Hispanic specfic scene, and for good reason. Her world-building is great, she does an amazing job of drawing on Latin American culture and bringing it to Western audiences. For me personally she’s a bit hit and miss, I actually thought that “Mexican Gothic” didn’t quite click for me, whereas “Certain Dark Things” I absolutely adored. As for “Signal to Noise”? Easily my favorite work of hers so far (amusingly, it's her first novel--more on that later)

This is the story of Meche, a woman who left her hometown of Mexico City basically as soon as she was old enough to do so.  She's back in town for her father's funeral, and in a series of flashbacks we learn the story of exactly why she left town (I'm a sucker for a good parallel-past-and-present-plotlines book)

The flashbacks take us from 2009 all the way back the ancient times of 1988, when she and her friends, particularly her best friend Sebastián, discovered that they could cast magic.  In fact, magic apparently runs in Meche's family as she discovers that her grandmother cast magic as a young woman as well.  Her grandmother informs her, however, of a couple of rules--magic doesn't last forever, it's the domain of the young, and one day it will fade; and magic always comes with a price

She [Meche's grandmother] didn’t think about magic very much anymore. That was part of her childhood, when Dolores and her sisters stitched spells with their needles. Spells to make the clouds release a gentle drizzle upon their heads. Spells to catch the eye of the boys in town. All those spells which were now gone, erased the same way a slate is erased with a warm cloth. But the memory of the feeling, of the magic...ah, that was still there.

Of course, while Dolores cast her spells with knitting needles, Meche and her friends find magic in the most logical of places for a child of the 80s--vinyl records.  Certain ones have power, and our main characters seek out this power

So.  15-year-olds discovering magic, using it to get money to buy clothes that will let them hang out with the cool kids at school, discovering that maybe it's not so simple and magic has a cost . . . I mean, this is basically an 80s movie.  And Moreno-Garcia is not ashamed of this

But what makes it different is that Meche isn't living an 80s movie . . . she's flashing back to one, she's remembering one.  And now she's back in town, running into these people from her past, people with whom she once shared magic before it was "erased the same way a slate is erased with a warm cloth.  But the memory of the feeling . . ."

Is it possible to reconnect, to rekindle, to recreate the same feelings we had with each other when we were younger, when the world was simpler and we hadn't been hurt as much?  Meche doesn't think so:

“I don’t know you,” she muttered. To the pillow, again. “You’re a stranger.” 

He turned her around and Meche frowned as she looked into eyes which were exactly the same as she remembered them. But the rest wasn’t. And this man... she had never ridden down the boulevard on this man’s motorcycle, never scrawled idly in his books, never listened to vinyl records in an old pantyhose factory with him. And that was that. You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did. Didn’t he get that?

I loved this novel because of how honest and personal it felt.  As I said above, this is Moreno-Garcia's first novel--and it shows, but not in an “unpolished” way, not in a "could have used more editing" way that many first novels have. It’s simply smaller in scale than much of her work.  There are basically only a handful of characters, and the plot is a simple one of a woman coming back to the town she left all those years ago, remembering the magic she and her friends shared, and retracing how it all went wrong. Tight, and simple, and personal

But within that simplicity, there is beauty.  Really, if I had to summarize it in a single sentence . . . “Signal to Noise” is about looking back on that period of your life when you could create magic, true magic, merely by selecting the exact right song at the right time

That's the central metaphor of this entire book, as flashback-Meche and Sebastián trawl through vinyl shops looking for the records that can create magic.  They don't know exactly what the magic is, they can't describe the how or the why, but as soon as they hold the record in their hands, they know it's . . . magic

There was a time in all of our lives when it really was that simple, when we enjoyed "the easy harmony of youth which did not know the need for tall walls and sturdy defenses."  The perfect song for that moment--there was a time when that was enough to create magic.  But as we get older, magic feels so much harder to find.  Is it possible to go back there?

I loved this book

Nina Simone. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood 

The Animals covered it and Santa Esmeralda made it famous, but Nina sang it like it was nobody’s business. Powerful blues and a voice that just punched you in the gut.