This book right here is by far my favorite read of the year. It had all the eerie gothic vibes. it had family drama and secrets that unraveled perfectly.
i loved the whole latinx folklore and was so scared to read at night.

the ending left me speechless. i loved it so much and will not stop recommending this book to everyone.

This is a gritty, atmospheric genre blending thriller perfect for readers who enjoy books that blend suspense, family drama, magical realism/folklore, and environmental commentary.
Taking place in a toxic borderland small town, Malamar ‘Mal’ Veracruz’s daughter and another local girl vanish. Mal races against the clock in a dangerous search for the girls which triggers lingering generational trauma of her sister’s disappearance decades ago. Folkloric horror/nightmares, family secrets, insidious local power dynamics, and cultural authenticity made this book captivating. I listened to audiobook narrated by Victoria Villarreal who did a fantastic job with the fluent code-switching, various accents, and multiple POVs. Her performance heightened the unsettling suspense, and perfectly captured the flawed, yet resilient Mal’s POV.

📚Book Review📚

Perfect for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Jennifer Givhan’s writing is truly stunning. Her prose lyrical and her characters deeply rich. This is a slow burn mystery that takes a bit to get going. Once it did, I was invested.

The characters live in the Mexicali borderlands surrounding California’s toxic Salton Sea. Bone shards have washed up from missing girls. More girls have gone missing.

Indigenous Mexican folklore at its finest. I would say Givhan’s writing is poetic and haunting. Trauma and the relationships with family are important factors. Working in a Mexican restaurant for five years now, I understood a good bit of the Spanish. Of course, it’s translated in English as well, but understanding a lot of it was natural for me.

I enjoyed the novel and recommend it to fans of folklore. Thank you again @mulhollandbooks .

4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Girls have always disappeared by the Salton Sea. That’s just the way it is, with Mexicali kids slipping into the darkness unnoticed by anyone outside their community. Elena Veracruz was one of those girls, a beautiful teenager with dreams of moving to Los Angeles to become a Laker Girl, until she fell off the face of the planet too at the age of sixteen.

Her mother always blamed Elena’s older sister Mal for not keeping an eye on Elena that night. Then again, Mami blamed Mal for everything, even before her mind started to unravel with dementia. So Mal grew up internalizing every disaster and trying to keep the peace in what was left of her family, to the extent of raising the little brother her mami and papi had lost interest in parenting, in the aftermath of losing Elena.

Though Mal is now grown and has teenage daughters herself, she can’t help but feel responsible sometimes for all the bad things that plague El Valle, despite knowing full well that they’re not her fault. She’s glad that her older daughter Griselda has a better than decent shot of getting out for good, though the allure of home calls strongly to their shared blood. When her younger daughter Amaranta disappears however, in a horrifying echo of what happened to Elena, Mal’s carefully constructed life begins to fall apart:

QUOTE
She chalked Amaranta’s sulky behavior to hormones. A necessary rebellion. But what if it was more? You should’ve been watching your sister, Mami bellows through the caverns of her mind. Has Mal not been watching her daughter?

Every moment as a mother has felt like tending a fickle garden. Too little water, and they wilt from neglect–just as Mal did under Mami’s inattention. But just as overwatering a succulent can drown it, too much affection can be a burden. Mami doted on Elena as she choked out Mal, and neither girl turned out okay. Mal doesn’t blame Mami for Elena’s disappearance on a conscious level, but something screeches in her intestines. It never stops screaming.
END QUOTE

Mal was a helpless teenager when Elena disappeared. Now, as a full-grown adult and mother, she’ll stop at nothing to find and rescue Amaranta, no matter what obstacles stand in her way. In order to do so, Mal must navigate a treacherous landscape populated by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the area, even as she fights her own family to get to the truth.

Perhaps her greatest battle, however, will be not with another person but with a figure out of legend. La Siguanaba is a hideous mythological creature said to appear every time a girl is taken. Mal herself thinks that she saw this monster on that long-ago night when Elena went missing:

QUOTE
She falls to her knees, blackening her hands with soil.

But the creature canters steadily toward her.

She scrambles up, the Salton Sea in sight, a soupy bog in the darkness.

Her feet crunch fish bones and the minuscule shells of dead crustaceans; millions of them crackle beneath her while she flies toward the pier stretching into the abandoned lake, all that “accidental” water sloshing for miles across the dusty bowl of valle, before the headlights overtake her, and the horse-headed woman cackles, her midnight-black mane scraggling down her bare back.

For a moment, she’s glowing yellow, gleaming with beads of sweat. Saintly.

Then the gunshots resound.
END QUOTE

Is there a logical explanation for the appearances of La Siguanaba? Perhaps a better question for readers is whether there even needs to be, as this explosive modern retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone explores family and power dynamics in the American borderlands. The landscape is an indelible part of the story as Jennifer Givhan masterfully sets her archetypal tale of missing girls and twisted relationships into a scenario so fresh and raw that almost every other version feels bloodless in comparison. Mal’s identity as a bisexual Mexican American woman harboring secrets that make her feel less than as a daughter, sister and mother further cement the story in the near past. The depiction of Mal’s grief and the frenzied madness it elicits in her are especially claustrophobic and convincing: a welcome reminder of the bright and furious emotions that underpin so many of these classic – and subsequently sanitized in the retelling – mythological tales.

But most of all Salt Bones is an astonishingly good mystery. Mal and her daughters search relentlessly for answers that expose the awful secrets and complicity festering at the heart of the community that they live in and love. Mal’s quest to save her daughter is as much about rescuing Amaranta as it is about finally solving what happened to Elena. Only by unearthing the truth will the area’s demons – figurative or otherwise – finally be put to rest, and Mal and her family finally be given a chance to heal.

I appreciate books that draw me in, not only into the story, but deeper into another culture.

Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan takes place near the Salton Sea in southern California and delves into Central American folklore. I admire how Givhan mixes elements of the old with a contemporary mystery, and I loved the parallels to the story of Persephone and Demeter.

In this dark and gritty tale, I could feel Mal's desperation as she searched for her daughter, and the second half of the book was a heart pounding race to an end I did NOT see coming! With missing girls, mother-daughter relationships, dark family secrets, and some California history, this blend of magical realism and horror is a perfect fall read!

Read this if you like:
• Family secrets
• Indigenous literature
• Magical realism mixed with horror
• Stories set in southern California
• Tales with Central American folklore
• Books that examine mother-daughter relationships

Many thanks to @mulhollandbooks for the complimentary copy! All thoughts and opinions are my own and provided voluntarily.

I heard great things about this one and the premise of a Spanish retelling of Persephone and Demeter. The writing was lyrical and deep. The mystery grabbed me at the beginning, but I found this one hard to connect with. As I continued to read I felt a little bored, and it was hard for me to keep everything straight, like the characters and timelines. I feel like this was just the wrong fit for me!

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own.

This one just didn’t work for me. The conversational Spanish was beautiful but I wish there’d been translations on the bottom of the page. I did like the spotlight it provides on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, though.

𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚: ★ ★ ★ ★
𝗔𝗥𝗖 𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪:

The writing style was so good, it definitely gave me the same vibes as Mexican Gothic as it said it might, and that was what drew me into it in the first place aside form the description and the cover, the cover though is stunning. This book pulled me in from the very first page, the way that the author writes and describes everything made it feel as though you were living inside this book the entire time. You get that eerie creepy tingle gothic vibe while you are reading and unsure what’s ahead on the next page, I loved that so much. This is just a beautifully written book that gives you all the feels from start to very last page. I highly recommend if you enjoy the tropes listed below. Highly.

𝗧𝗥𝗢𝗣𝗘𝗦: Secrets, Twists and Turns, Lies, Eerie, Gothic Vibe, Fast Paced

Large thank you to our Author, NetGalley as well as Little, Brown and Company | Mulholland Books

It was clear from the description of Jennifer Givhan’s recent novel Salt Bones, that there would be some compelling family dynamics at play as well as some commentary on community and how it deals with tragedy. Salt Bones didn’t disappoint on either of those fronts and the added magical realism elements further cemented it as a book that was going to be right up my alley. Aside from a few issues with its pacing (particularly through the middle), I found the characters and the story they told incredibly compelling. The parent/child relationships, in particular, were engaging in how they contrasted when held up to one another. Sibling relationships come under a similar scrutiny as the line between parent and sibling blurs in several cases.

Mal became the caretaker of much of her family in the wake of her younger sister, Elena’s disappearance when they were in high school. First her baby brother, then her own two daughters needed her. With her resentful mother’s worsening dementia and her father’s limited ability to care for her on his own, Mal is stretched thin and perhaps isn’t noticing some of what’s going on with her daughters, especially her youngest, Amaranta. But when Amaranta vanishes in a manner that is eerily similar to how Elena disappeared more than twenty years before, Mal gains new understanding of what her own mother went through. She’s having terrifying dreams and visions of La Siguanaba – a vengeful, horse-headed woman whom mythology says either targeted unfaithful men or kidnapped young women. Is she losing her mind due to her fear and suspicion or is La Siguanaba haunting (or hunting) her for a different reason?

Givhan sets up many parallels throughout the novel as the events of twenty-something years before seem like they’re being revisited upon a new generation. With so much of the novel focused on Mal, the parallels between her and her mother and then her and her eldest daughter rise easily to the surface. She occupies the space of being both the mother responsible for protecting her child (and failing) and the older sister tasked with keeping an eye on her younger sister (and failing). After the way she’d always been treated by her mother (terrible even before Elena vanished), Mal made a conscious decision that her relationship with her own daughters would be different. She wouldn’t let them feel unwanted or resented. She wouldn’t take out her bad moods on them. She would protect them and they wouldn’t get stuck in El Valle the way she had. Except her younger daughter vanishes just like Elena did. Despite the difference in the relationship, a similar tragedy occurred. Mal begins to sympathize more with her mother and to understand that some of the lashing out likely stems from frustration with herself, from guilt and helplessness.

Mal’s position as both parent and child are similarly paralleled with the other characters of her generation, most notably in her brother Esteban. He too was older than Elena and, therefore, was expected to help keep an eye on her when she went missing. He also protected Mal from some of their mother’s undeserved resentment growing up… when he was around. His absence and/or distraction comes back around again in his parenting of the twins he shares with his ex-wife. As a local politician with aspirations for a larger sphere of influence, Esteban is constantly distracted by his campaign and by keeping up appearances. His good intentions and plans for the larger community often mean he neglects or manipulates his home situation as best serves him and his campaign. As the truth of what happened both twenty years ago and in the present come to light, it becomes clear that those priorities aren’t about to change either

Salt Bones is an atmospheric Persephone and Demeter retelling mixed with Mexican folklore that is set in the Mexicali borderlands. I could not put this book down! It’s a fast paced thriller about young missing Latine women written with beautiful prose and woven with Mexican folklore and messy family drama. This is comped as: “for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Ramona Emerson’s shutter,” and the is such a spot on comp! 5 stars 🌟 Many thanks to the publishers & NetGalley for an arc in exchange for my honest opinion.

Both Malamar and the town she lives in, El Valle, are festering under a legacy of missing girls. Her own sister Elena disappeared without a trace decades ago, and she has done her best to raise her daughters with that horrible memory weighing her down. But when another girl disappears, her family's history and legends of a horse-headed spirit that hunts the vulnerable collide in horrific ways.

This book was great! It's such a nuanced look into motherhood and family, and grief and privilege while mixing folklore elements and suspense. The characters are real, the action is gritty, the environment is toxic and suffocating, and I was hooked. I thought the book dragged a little bit in the middle (I think I say this about a lot of books so this might just be a me issue 💀) but this book is gooood.

I really love how Givhan has incorporated the Spanish language into this novel. Many of the inhabitants of El Valle are Mexican and Indigenous, and both English and Spanish are thrown around, often within the same sentence, in a way that feels natural to bilingual speakers. So many books either shy away from including too many non-English terms, but Givhan unapologetically includes Spanish as her characters would speak it.

There were a few details I found extraneous (the cousins had literally no reason to be like that) but overall loved this one. Going to be checking out Givhan's other books.

.

CW violence (including gun violence), death (human & animal), murder, blood

In a community on the edge of the poisoned, environmentally degraded Salton Sea in southern California, daughters have been disappearing. This haunted place is vividly brought to life in a novel that combines a thrilling plot, deeply developed characters, and a poetic evocation of the borderland. It’s a borderland in multiple senses: between Mexican, indigenous, and American heritages, between languages, between horror, thriller, and mystery genres, between everyday reality and the deeper truth of folklore. And it’s very, very good.

Malamar Veracruz, named by a vengeful, hateful mother, is a skilled butcher in the desert town of Valle that lies beside a saltwater inland sea that has been polluted, drained, and left to evaporate in the heat, now exploited for geothermal energy and lithium mining. Though once a popular resort destination, the shoreline now is littered with bones and poisonous dust, with mudpots and geysers bubbling up from the earth’s heat.

Many years ago, Mal’s sister Elena vanished, leaving her mother bereft and angry, seeming to hold Mal responsible for the absence of her favorite daughter. Now Mal is raising two daughters of her own, Griselda, a university student who is dating the son of the wealthy Anglo family that owns all of the land nearby, and teenager Amaranta. She tries to be a good mother, though she keeps secrets from them, including who their father is. As it turns out, she isn’t the only one in her family with secrets.

When a young coworker at the carnicería disappears, like other young women before her, Mal is unsettled, wondering why so many women vanish from this haunted place. Some suspect Gus, who searches the shoreline for the bones of his vanished daughter, is responsible for all of the desaparecidos. Before she can figure it out, the crisis comes much closer to home.

While Mal searches for answers, she keeps encountering La Siguanaba, a monstrous figure from a local folktale who Mal first encountered when her sister disappeared. The creature is a beautiful seductive woman, with midnight-black hair, until she turns: she has the head of a horse, with glowing red eyes. Why is this legendary figure pursuing her, and is it somehow responsible for the way so many daughters are taken?

Threaded throughout the story is an exploration of mothers and daughters, of inherited trauma, of environmental injustice and the dispossession of the original inhabitants of this extraordinary place and the natural world it once supported. The characters speak a mix of English and Spanish, bringing mestizo culture to the page and infusing the narrative with an unapologetic flavor of the borderlands. Without sacrificing pacing or raw emotion, the narrative is full of arresting images and starling wordplay. The plot, too, is cleverly unfolded, all the clues in plain view but only assembled as the pieces click together. All in all, this novel is a tour de force of storytelling and an extraordinary work of crime fiction.

This one was a really cool premise, I loved the idea of a Spanish retelling of Persephone and dementer but this one was so tough to get into. I had a hard time jumping into the actual story of this

You should definitely listen to this one. The Spanish phrases and Hispanic accents helped the story flow.

This is a slow burn mystery that keeps you guessing till the last page. For much of the beginning I didn’t know what was going on. But it slowly unfolded and wrapped up well. It’s lots of family and small town drama. It’s a mother trying to raise her daughters in a family full of secrets. It’s indigenous people whose ancestors have lived on the land forever versus the decedents of colonizers who now own the land. And it’s the value of women and who gets looked for when missing.

The Salton Sea of southern California is a part of the country I didn’t know existed before this book. The setting lends an atmospheric air to the story and in many ways becomes one of the characters. I definitely wasn’t aware of the many environmental issues facing the area.

This one is worth the read even if you’re not sure what’s happening for the first half!

Thank you to @Netgalley @mulhollandbooks and @littlebrown for the chance to review this ARC and to @hachetteaudio for the ALC.

Salt bones takes a traditional mystery trope of missing girls and adds a Latin supernatural horror element to it. Mals sister Elena disappeared from their small town of salton sea years ago and was never found. Mal thought she has put the past behind her and made peace with the loss and has raised her own family in this town. However, the past repeats itself with another missing girl with circumstances similar to that of Elena. Guided by a visage of a horse headed woman(a Latin folklore) and her two daughters, mal will uncover the truth of her town and her sister before it’s too late for others—namely her daughters.

This is a fun mystery-loved the atmosphere and.the incorporation of the Latin horror elements and folk lore. Took it up a notch from the traditional missing person mystery!

Thanks to the publisher for providing the arc via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Years after the disappearance of her younger sister, Elena, Malamar Veracruz is still living in her small, diminishing hometown of El Valle along the Salton Sea. Now, another set of disappearances are occurring, including Mar's youngest daughter, Amaranta.  Playing out similarly to when Elena disappeared, everyone blames the local outcast and won't look into the wealthy landowners.  Mar is also being haunted once again by La Singuanaba, the horse headed woman, showing her haunting scenarios of where the missing girls could be. The visions vault Mar and her older daughter into a desperate search for Amaranta while Mar stops at nothing to find her daughter alive. 

"It started with Noemi.  But within a few months, Elena was gone too.  No one knows it's a horror story when it begins."

 Salt Bones is a slow burn horror that wraps indigenous folklore with a gripping mystery.  "Salt Bones" excels in both character and plot-driven mystery. Mal is a compelling protagonist, fiercely protective of her family and still burdened by the intergenerational trauma of her sister's disappearance. Her unique role as a butcher and her connection to the land, animals, and sea, passed down from her father, make her uniquely receptive to La Singuanaba's messages, which I found to be a captivating element. The narrative thoughtfully switches between points of view of those involved in the current disappearances and flashbacks to Elena's disappearance, providing a comprehensive understanding of the circumstances and characters. The lyrical prose creates a dreamlike atmosphere, leaving you to ponder the line between the paranormal and the harsh reality of the girls' disappearances.

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

Using Latine folklore and a reimagining of Demeter and Persephone, Jennifer Givhan crafts a climate-conscious story that addresses the lack of concern over the disappearances of Indigenous and Latine women and girls that remains, an issue that little attention is given to. The story has multiple twists and turns and plays out as a multi-generational family drama set on the backdrop of the Salton Sea.

Givhan takes on a lot with a very large cast of characters, some of which are well-fleshed out and others feel somewhat flung to the side. She does a great job of hinting at the mythological inspiration and weaving in the folklore throughout. Due to the large cast of characters, it takes a bit to get started. Once hitting the 30% mark, the pace begins to pick up. Though there are supernatural elements, the text falls more into the thriller category.

Personally, I enjoyed the story and I found the characters complex, but generally likable, and I was rooting for Mal and her daughters. I did struggle with the way that perspectives changed rapidly without warning, though this may have been an early draft issue that might be corrected in the published version. I also struggled with twist fatigue at the close of the text. There were a lot of reveals that change how several characters are viewed when looking back at them. If you enjoyed books like Shutter by Ramona Emerson or Jackal by Erin E. Adams, this may be a book to check out.

This is a tale of mothers and daughters and the deep connections that surface when danger presents itself. It is a Mexican style retelling of Persephone and Demeter where a family member goes missing on a shore town. There is folklore, magical realism, a mystery, and flawed, real characters with grit. I didn’t care for the Spanish words so heavily sprinkled in, but I would’ve been okay if they were a light sprinkle. I felt that the heavy dose of Spanish actually slowed down and hindered the story. I was gifted an ARC of this title through NetGalley and the publisher and these opinions are my own.

There’s something undeniably rich and lyrical about Salt Bones, the kind of poetic, layered storytelling that feels more like slipping into a dream than following a straight path. I could see the artistry and the heart in these pages, and I genuinely admired what the author set out to do. But the farther I read, the more I found myself getting lost in the fog.

It’s not that the book is bad, far from it. The writing pulses with feeling, and I actually enjoyed the challenge for a while. But I reached a point where I realized I was spending more time trying to decode the story than connect with it. And for me, that’s when I know it’s time to gently step away.

This one just wasn’t quite the right fit for me as a reader, but I have no doubt it’ll speak deeply to those who love their fiction atmospheric, symbolic, and emotionally raw.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy.

Sometimes it’s simply about timing and knowing when to let a book go with kindness.

I love a good retelling and when I saw this book was a Persephone and Demeter retelling set on the Mexicali Borderlands, I knew I wanted to read it…and yes, it is a light retelling but this story is so much more.

This book is part folklore thriller, part mystery, part horror, and part mother/daughter relationships. I really liked the mix of creepy tension and suspense and Mexican/Indigenous culture. The author is so talented and I loved her writing style. I don’t use this description often, but this story is truly atmospheric.

There are so many layers to this story and the characters and overall is a very important and timely story to tell.

This is a book that has a slower build…the author paints this picture that is hard to ignore…and yes there are some tough moments and these characters are messy at times…but the story really picks up. No spoilers here, but the ending might just have you asking who the real monsters are…