Dream with Our Eyes Open

I read this as a potential Hugo Award nominee.

Casiopeia Tun is despised by most of her family. Her mother married for love, taking as a husband a poor scholar of indifferent pedigree. Now mother and daughter live in Casiopeia's Grandfather Cirilo's home on sufferance, performing servants' tasks. Only for one thing does old Cirilo value his granddaughter: she is bright and educated enough to read the newspaper to him. His grandson, Martin, spoiled and indulged, is a dolt.

After a quarrel with her loathsome cousin, Casiopeia is left behind when the family takes its annual holiday. At loose ends, she happens to look in the big chest at the end of her grandfather's bed – and awakens the death god Hun-Kamé, whose bones were sealed in the chest. Hun-Kamé's twin brother Vucub-Kamé, equally terrifying and much more cruel, deposed Hun-Kamé long ago after rendering him less powerful by removing portions of his anatomy and placing them in the care of Vucub-Kamé's minions. Freed from his enchanted prison, Hun-Kamé aims to regain what he has lost, and Casiopeia must help him.

The two set off on a wonderful and sometimes creepy road trip across 1920s Mexico. The setting is one I've not encountered before, and Moreno-Garcia depicts it vividly. Hun-Kamé passes himself off as a man of wealth and power, and Casiopeia is part of his act. The neglected girl is not dazzled by the sumptuous clothing and hotel suites, even though she enjoys them, but their alliance is changing both of them. Hun-Kamé is powering himself with Casiopeia's life-force, but it slowly dilutes his godhood even as it allows him to continue existing in the mortal world.

In the book's final section, the action moves to the underworld, and a weakened Casiopeia must run a grueling magical race against Vucub-Kamé's chosen champion. This section was less interesting to me: it seems a lifeless imitation of the real-world race that Casiopeia has already run as Hun-Kamé's handmaiden, and although the classical mythical/folkloric tropes that occur are well placed and well written, they aren't as interesting to me as the lively scenes that preceded them.

The story's ending is abbreviated, but it does what needs doing. Casiopeia leaves the presence of the gods as her own woman.

This was a good story, and the middle portion was very good indeed. But it was told at an emotional distance, almost as thought the author was retelling a myth. In that way it reminded me of A Wizard of Earthsea, especially in contrast to The Tombs of Atuan. A Wizard of Earthsea is someone else's recounting of Ged's story, but we live The Tombs of Atuan inside Arha's head. Similarly, even though Moreno-Garcia tells this story from Casiopeia's viewpoint, we're still at a remove. That's not my preferred experience in fiction, so although I liked this book, I didn't love it.

NPR's review comments that "Moreno-Garcia's book is a dispatch from a universe where indigenous American legends have always been part of the lexicon of fantasy." I think that's fair.