Full disclosure: I was given a free PDF copy of this book by Books Forward in exchange for an honest review.

Within the last few years, there has been more attention on books written by authors of color. These often reveal perspectives that’s normally not highlighted in the mainstream, and they can find ways to connect with lots of readers. An example of this is "Valley of Shadows" by Rudy Ruiz – a good recontextualization Hero’s Journey story with a Mexican protagonist in 1883 Mexico/Texas.

"Valley of Shadows" is a visionary neo-Western blend of magical realism, mystery, and horror, and it explores the dark past of injustice, isolation, and suffering along the US-Mexico border. In 1883 West Texas, after the Rio Grande shifted course, the Mexican city of Olvido gets stranded on the northern side of the new border between the US and Mexico border. When a series of mysterious and horrific crimes occur in the divided town, a Mexican lawman is lured out of retirement to restore order and to save the lives of abducted children. In the face of skeptics and hostile Anglo settlers, Solitario Cisneros struggles to overcome not only the evil forces in the area, but also his own inner demons. He is burdened by a mystical curse that has guided his lonely destiny, until Onawa, a gifted and beautiful Apache-Mexican seer, joins his mission and dares him to change the course of both their lives.

There were many things that I liked about this book. First off, I thought the characters were done well. I like Solitario as a character, for he’s smart, stoic, and good at what he does. Readers can easily see why he’s so reluctant to assist the town with solving the crimes as well as wants to be alone. He yearns to do the right thing in the name of honor even if it tears him apart from the people that he loves. He’s also battling some demons due to a curse that his grandmother placed on the male side of his family. In addition, I like Onawa, who is half Mexican and half Apache. She possesses supernatural abilities and assists Solitario. Even though her main motive is to be with him, she becomes more confident and figures out what she really wants after spending most of her life with her father away from her tribe. Furthermore, I want to give credit to Ruiz for including a diverse cast of white, Mexican, and indigenous people. This reflects the real makeup of Texas as opposed to what other stories that involve the US-Mexico border depict.

In addition, it does an effective job with addressing identity, injustice, and discrimination in this time period. With identity, the non-white characters often ruminate on who they are and where their homes are. This is true both physically with Mexicans discovering that Olvido has suddenly moved to the United States because of the shifting Rio Grande and mentally with Solitario wanting a place to be loved, but without being reminded of his past. The injustice aspect is highlighted when Onawa acknowledges how if Solitario as the new sheriff arrests a white person for a crime, then he would be considered racist by the Anglo settlers, but if he apprehends a Mexican person, then other Mexicans would assume that he’s selling out his own ethnicity. Moreover, racial discrimination is constantly acknowledged in a multitude of ways. For example, while Solitario investigates, the town gets so restless that some of the white men decide to round up the Mexican and Apache men and boys and shoot them in order to execute their own version of justice. Luckily, he thwarts this crime by playing his guitar and putting those would-be murderers to sleep. This all works because Ruiz – a son of Mexican immigrants – understands that identity, injustice, and discrimination surface in many ways.

Furthermore, I love the recurring theme of never truly being alone. While Solitario (good name for a guy who wants to be alone) wants to live by himself away from others, he’s constantly reminded of the people around him like his family and his deceased wife due to the curse. Even his friend and sidekick Elias (as a ghost) sticks by Solitario as the latter encounters the trials and tribulations of searching for the kids and the perpetrators.

One thing that I observed is that the book likes to pepper in various Spanish words and phrases. It gives it more authenticity. I imagined the Mexican characters speaking to each other in that language even when the text is in English. While it does help to know a little bit of Spanish, readers will most likely be able to figure out what they mean through the context.

While reading the novel, I also discovered that even though it’s nearly 500 pages, it moves at a brisk pace. Outside of Spanish words and phrases, Ruiz mostly avoids using jargon in the text. Moreover, the pacing matches the urgency of the situation. This is especially true in how Solitario genuinely wants to solve the crimes and prove himself to the white settlers in Olvido in his own way.

One final thing that I noticed while reading it is that it perfectly fits with the Hero’s Journey template popularized by Joseph Campbell. Solitario gets the call to help the town to solve the crimes as the new sheriff, but he refuses outright. However, he ends up searching for the abducted children with assistance from Onawa, who has supernatural abilities. He goes through some trials, meets with a woman who knows about Aztec culture, (the kidnappers and murderers use that civilization’s rituals to carry out their crimes) who assists him with the murders and kidnappings (Meeting with a Goddess), and has an atonement with the Father (which results in a great twist). And of course, he experiences death and rebirth. Even though it felt a little too neat, I feel that it was done that way, so readers could recognize the template in other stories like "Star Wars." "Valley of Shadows" does an effective spin on the Hero’s Journey.

Finally, I want to point out that this might not be for everybody. There are some scenes, in which people are brutally murdered. For instance, its opening scene contains the first Olvido sheriff, his wife, and their eldest son getting murdered, and it’s pretty gory. Even I got squeamish at times. Additionally, some people might not like the talk about injustice and the plot being “woke,” thinking that’s too contemporary. I think it’s necessary because it feels natural to the story. Solitario faces plenty of bigoted Anglo settlers who feel entitled to many things like land in Olvido and being allowed to perform their own version of the law.

All in all, "Valley of Shadows" by Rudy Ruiz is a good novel that features a diverse cast and acknowledges perspectives that aren’t usually recognized. Some people may be turned off by the gory bits or the talk of injustice, but the book is worth the read because it recontextualizes the Hero’s Journey into late 19th century Mexico/Texas, and it has very likable characters that readers would want to root for. I would recommend it for those who love westerns, horrors, and magic realism as well as want to read more titles by Latine authors. The book is out now, so get it at your local bookstore or library!

If you have read Rudy Ruiz’s The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez (2020), find a copy of Valley of Shadows now! If you haven’t read the earlier book, start with the new one and follow it up with the first.

Both are set on the Texas-Mexico border and deal in part with the Cisneros family maldición or curse. Fulgencio’s story opens in 1986 whereas his ancestor Solitario’s opens more than a century earlier in 1883. While Fulgencio determines to break the curse about which he knows little, Valley of Shadows fills in more of the family history.

In Valley of Shadows’ prologue, Sheriff Tolbert, his wife, and son Johnny are brutally murdered in their barn. In the first chapter, three riders appear--"two gringos and a mexicano"--to recruit former sheriff Solitario to solve the murders. A younger Tolbert son Frankie and two still younger daughters, Abigail and Beatrice, have vanished. Solitario does not want the job. He prefers to live alone on his side of the Mexican border where his beloved dead Luz appears to him briefly each evening, a nightly reminder of the family curse Solitario’s grandmother cast long ago on the family and now wishes she had the power to remove.

This book will transport you to a world in which Solitario can matter-of-factly tell an elderly Apache man and his daughter that the ghost of murdered Johnny Tolbert has appeared to him with clues to help find the missing children and in which his Apache friends will accept that news without question or doubt.

Readers will come to care about the characters and feel that they have spent time in the vividly portrayed setting among its multicultural people. In both books, the changing course of the Rio Grande not only changes the international border, it has personal, political, economic, and environmental repercussions impacting this family saga.

Author Rudy Ruiz knows the Rio Grande Valley and is one of its people. He grew up along the border, left home to earn degrees at Harvard, and now lives in San Antonio. With Valley of Shadows, a book with heart, he takes readers home again.

Thanks to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for an advance reader copy.

Posted to GoodReads and Barnes and Noble.

Full disclosure I DNFed at 100 pages. It was such a cool premise but there was just so much going on and the narrative changes were really sudden it made it very hard to follow. I wasn't invested in the characters at all. This one just wasn't for me, unfortunately.

Will be very, very excited to see what this author writes next. I'm not sure I loved the writing of this but it might just have been that I read it while I had covid so I didn't include that in my rating.

“”Discrimination is evil, but evil does not discriminate.”

1883, West Texas. In the vast desert, a gleaming river snakes beneath the blinding sun. When the Rio Grande shifts course, the Mexican city of Olvido is stranded on the northern side of the new border between the United States and Mexico.

When a series of mysterious and horrific crimes grips the divided border town, a reclusive former Mexican lawman is lured out of retirement to restore order and save the lives of a growing number of abducted children. In the face of skeptics and hostile Anglo settlers, the war-weary charro, Solitario Cisneros, struggles to overcome not only the evil forces that threaten his town, but also his own inner demons. He is burdened by the turbulent darkness of a mystical curse that has guided his lonely destiny, until Onawa, a gifted and beautiful Apache-Mexican seer, joins his mission and dares him to change the course of both their lives.”

This book is labeled Horror, Magical Realism, and Historical Fiction. Only the latter is a favoured genre.

Look at me, reading out of my comfort zone.

I admit to being completely seduced by the cover.

While I found the grisly bits a little too, well, grisly, I really did think the book beautifully written.

Beautiful is, of course, the wrong word – rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping can’t be considered anything but horrific – but the descriptions of everything from the town, to the people, to the visions, ghosts, and rituals, was almost cinematic.

The dialogue was fairly melodramatic – as if the characters were competing in a Quotable Quotes contest, but other than that, I really enjoyed dipping my toes into this bit of literary fusion.

6.5/10

Thanks to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for this ARC.

A masterful of many genres. Ruiz writes a gripping story that held my interest throughout the novel. Can't wait to see more of what he writes.

Solitario Cisneros was the sheriff in the town of Olvido, Mexico until the Rio Grande changed course and left Olivido and its inhabitants as part of the United States. Along with losing his job, soon after Solitario lost his wife, Luz. He blames a curse, a malediction placed on his family, but he is still comforted by Luz's ghost that visits every night. Now, a gruesome killing has hit Olvido and Solitario has been asked to investigate. He wants to stay away, but the ghost of a young boy killed that night encourages Solitario to find his siblings. Solitario agrees to take the case, but as he makes headway in finding the lost siblings, more ritualistic killings occur and more children are taken. With the help of Apache seer Onawa, an old bruja as well as the ghosts of those who have passed, Solitario is on the hunt for those behind the murders.

"The night is dark, but it is also full of light."

Valley of Shadows is a masterful blend of western, horror, historical fiction and magical realism. I have previously read the Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez and this book takes place before it, explaining more of the history of the curse, it was nice to fill in some backstory there. The story starts off immediately in the action and pulled me into the mystery of the strange murders. Solitario's character brings in more mystery as his complexities arise. Solitario is cursed and lonely, but he also has a strong sense of justice and a special set of abilities that have been bestowed to him. Through some flashbacks, Solitario's past, love life, curse and the experiences that made him the man he is are revealed. It almost seemed like this could have been another book. As the crimes continue to build, Solitario realizes the impact of racism, fear and greed that has overtaken the town. Solitario must relinquish his loneliness and use his abilities to fight for the people of his town and bring down an evil that wishes to separate them. Valley of Shadows is a complex story from unique viewpoint of a Mexican-American in the 1880's that creates a haunting and compelling mystery.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review.

Summary: In the volatile borderlands surrounding the Rio Grande, Americans and Mexicans have been at war for years over where one nation stops and another begins. It's 1870, and former sheriff Solitario Cisneros lives just outside of the border town of Olvido, content to be alone and mourn the loss of his wife. When a series of gruesome murders begin to occur in town, though, Solitario is recruited to return to his post and attempt to solve the mystery. With little to go on, he may have to turn to supernatural forces to discover what's threatening the already-tenuous future of the town and its citizens. He turns to Onawa, a Mexican-Apache woman whose powers of divining and tenacious attitude might help him save the town — and discover some things about himself along the way. The publisher's description says it best: "As we follow Solitario and Onawa into the desert, we join them in facing haunting questions about the human condition that are as relevant today as they were back then: Can we rewrite our own history and shape our own future? What does it mean to belong to a place, or for a place to belong to a people? And, as lonely and defeated as we might feel, are we ever truly alone?"

My Thoughts: From a truly shocking and gruesome start, this book carries its reader along like the river that runs through the heart of it. It twists and turns, at times tranquil and at others rapid and tumultuous. It's exactly what I wanted from a book marketed as "a neo-Western blend of magical realism, mystery, and horror." The desert setting, the dynamic river, and the essence of folklore create a setting and tone to the story that continually drew me in. Solitario's story, in the main plot of the book and in flashbacks to his life during the war, has elements of a classic Western, complete with gunslinging and dramatic rescues on horseback. His mission to save the citizens of Olvido blends mystery and horror — the depictions of the murders are truly terrifying, and the reader gets to follow the clues as Solitario discovers them. However, what sets this book apart is the thread of magical realism that runs throughout it. Ghosts, curses, Aztec rituals, and divination are regular occurrences in Solitario's world, but they serve to highlight the real, human struggles that these characters face — loneliness, cultural and border conflicts, racism and discrimination, and the impact of history on the present and the future. Throughout it all, this novel explores the conflicts that arise on the borders: between nations, between races, between life and death, between love and loneliness.

Rudy Ruiz’s Valley of Shadows is a neo-Western, with gothic and magical realist elements, set on the US-Mexico border.

Solitario, the novel’s protagonist, is, as you might expect, a loner. A veteran of the Second French Intervention in Mexico and carrying the burden of a generational family curse, he is called out of retirement to investigate the brutal murder of the sheriff and his family. In the town that once was Mexico, before the Rio Grande changed course, tensions between Mexican residents, the new white inhabitants, and their Apache neighbors runs high. Joined by Onawa, an Apache-Mexican woman with incredible gifts, Solitario works to solve these crimes and prevent more deaths.

Ruiz’s writing is at times poignant and beautiful, but at others unwieldy and awkward. The same is true of Solitario and Onawa, the two main characters; they are compelling, but ultimately fall flat. They are defined by a few characteristics and are rarely granted complexity beyond one or two desires (or maybe I’m just tired of young women being inexplicably drawn to the mysterious loner who is, ultimately, not a great romantic prospect).

The novel is jam packed with curses, ghosts, magical objects, the shadow of forgotten gods, socio-political unrest, and a string of grisly murders. It certainly kept me on my toes, but it is difficult to achieve satisfying resolutions with so many interrelated plot points in a relatively short span of time. I enjoyed Valley of Shadows, but wish it had taken more time to develop a few ideas rather than trying to get so many in. The ending did leave open the possibility of a sequel, where some of these loose ends might be taken up again.

In a Texas-Mexico town where the course of the river has altered the border and the life of the town, a former sheriff is asked to put his star back on to solve a series of gruesome murders.

Valley of Shadows was WOW, a great slow burn paranormal mystery. The ghostly element really kept me on my toes, you never could tell which way something was going to go. I was hooked from the first page!

There are so many reasons I love this novel. First, the historical landscape had nuance and depth; the perspective decolonized the past, highlighted the transnational experience of the American-Mexican borderlands through the eyes of the Mexicans and the indigenous peoples who lived there. Ruiz did not shy away from the racial tensions, the ethnic conflicts, and the histories of colonization that were part of the fabric of life on the borderlands in the 19th century — and I deeply appreciated that. Indeed, much of the plot revolves around those very transcultural tensions. This grounded this paranormal western/mystery/horror in a historical reality that made the events all the more horrific; they were real. The violence of this time was real, not a fiction of Ruiz’s imagination.

Second, Ruiz’s use of linguistic and ethnic markers is significant. Yes, this is a novel, but it is also a work of decolonization. Ruiz disrupts the whiteness of the Western genre with Valley of Shadows. The primary protagonist is Solitario Cisneros, a Mexican man who used to be sheriff — and could still be. Onawa is a young half Mexican, half Apache woman who assists Solitario in his investigation of a series of murders. The living and the dead show up in various parts of the story, some from Solitario’s past which is never far behind him. History in this novel is very much a dynamic, fluid factor in this novel; it is almost as alive as the characters.

There is a mix of white, Mexican, mixed-race, and indigenous characters in this novel, mimicking the historical and contemporary reality of North American borderland communities; nothing is ever cut-and-dry, black or white in such places, then or now. This diversity of identities makes the characters more recognizable; their ethnic and historical diversity mimics our own multiple identities and ways of being. Race, ethnicity, class, and history shaped these characters, making them palpable, their decisions and actions authentic and borne out of subjective needs and ambitions as much as they were shaped by social and historical factors.

Third, Ruiz unfolded the story with skill. Tension and mystery were embedded in the plot, compelling me to read on, but it was the way in which Ruiz slowly unravelled the plot. At the end the reader will see that all the threads of the mystery were there, almost from the very start, waiting for us to weave them into fabric. The story revolves around a series of gruesome, brutal murders. There is very real, physical horror here; the idea that these could be done by a human being on another is scary enough — but there’s the possibility this could be something more supernatural. Which is more sinister?

Valley of Shadows is Solitario and Onawa’s adventures in this realm and the next as they speed against time to save the other potential victims, apprehend the murderer(s), and deliver justice to the victims and their surviving families.

This was an extremely ambitious book, and I think that it, for the most part, succeeded. This is more than just magical realism or historical fiction. It's also a social commentary about rather or not we are more than our pasts and our cultural past.

The book is well written. It's a bit clunky, slow, and wordy at times, but overall has good dialogue and character narrative that helps move the story along during those parts.

I think it's a great read for anyone who likes historical fiction, westerns, or magical realism.

The setup sounded intriguing but this novel was just too out there with me, too much of mish mash of genres.

Thanks to NetGalley for this advanced reader copy of Valley of Shadows. Overall, I enjoyed this story - magical realism always hits the right spots for me. Set in the American west, the author uses lore and history to create a narrative with somewhat typical characters whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways. There was a bit of culturally insensitive material, which was uncomfortable at points. This blend of magic, the occult, history, and horror was clever but the characters weren't particularly endearing to me. I didn't find myself really rooting for anyone in particular.

This book was extremely moving and powerful. I think many people will benefit from the lessons of this story. I hope this book ends up in the hands of many.

A magical realist novel set in the American West and drawing on historical conflicts between white colonialist settlers and Indigenous groups, this book brings together Native American magic and generically white ritual magic to create a mystery. The characters are a bit stock--the evil, racist, white guys, the indigenous woman with magic, the stoic man who sees and communicates with ghosts. But even so, it's a complex and entertaining read, good for long hot summer days when you can easily imagine the setting alongside a river run dry and heat mirages flickering like phantoms.

This was an interesting novel that blended historical accounts and a representation of different cultures with magical realism and mysterious circumstances.

I enjoyed discovering the secrets of the time and trying to solve the case alongside Solitario and Tormenta. But towards the end of the book unfortunately I lost interest. I found at times the writing was magical and captivating, but at others, it felt repetitive or lackluster.

An interesting premise, however, this book wasn't for me. But if you enjoy traveling back in time and learning about different cultures with a magical aspect blended seemingly authentically I recommend giving it a read.

I found this one interesting—a blend of western, magic realism, mystery, and a touch of horror—it kept my attention and surprised me on a number of occasions. It dealt head on with the effects of Mexican American border changes in the 1860s and 1870s and the ever-present racism and injustice to both Mexican and indigenous populations. The story follows a run of graphic murders starting with the local sheriff and his family—pulling the gifted former rurales, Solitario Cisneros, back to the town of Olvido to investigate.

I didn’t, couldn’t, finish this book because it didn’t really work for me. At first, I found this book very interesting, with pretty good opening and an interesting protagonist. But then the “case” didn’t seem to be the “case”. It was going down to personal problems of the main character and the story started to drag.

I enjoyed reading the book but I didn't think it warrants a much higher rating.
I love magical realism books and the writing for this one is good for me but the plot point of the story is the main reason why I decided to give it a 3 star. I loved reading about the mexican culture but the events leading towards the ending didn't put me on edge as much as I thought it would.