Title: Magdalena
Author: Candi Sary
Series: n/a
Not my cuppa
Thank you to Candi Sary and Regal House Publishing for allowing me to read a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thanks also to Laura Marie of Laura Marie Public Relations for inviting me on the blog tour.
So . . . I read this novel because the description leaned hard into the paranormal aspect, and I love a good ghost story. It sounded a little emotional and cerebral, sure, but the forecast was calling for rain, and it was a shortish book, so what the heck. I gave it a shot.
Thing is, the blurb and promotional material were all mum on the fact that this is actually literary fiction. If I’d known that, I’d have passed. Literary fiction isn’t my thing, so I’m afraid I found this book lacking.
Let’s start with Dottie, the MC. She’s very sympathetic . . . to a point. I feel bad that she was raised by a mentally ill mother and a father who seemed rather apathetic by Dottie’s description. I feel bad that Dottie was bullied most of her life, that her husband’s a vegetable, that she suffered multiple miscarriages, that she’s desperately lonely. I feel bad that she doesn’t possess either the desire or the drive to get out and explore, expand her world, meet new people. I feel bad about the awful circumstances of her life that she can’t control.
What I don’t feel bad about are the decisions she makes that do nothing to help herself, good intentions notwithstanding. She’s not a stupid woman, yet she really does some dumb things. Stalking a minor, for example. Allowing a bird to harass her. Walking around town like she’s casing the place and stalking children. Buying the market out of mushrooms. Watching the world out her front window, because she has nothing else to do. Scratching herself till she’s a bloody mess (not shaming compulsions, but seek help!). Allowing a man to take advantage of her right next to her vegetable husband.
Now, obviously Dottie isn’t mentally or emotionally stable. It’s not clear in the narrative if she’s just unbelievably naive, or if she’s a bit mentally handicapped as well. Pile on all those crappy circumstances she’s been forced to live through, and yeah, it’s not surprising her judgment is skewed and she doesn’t have much self-awareness. But, dude. She seems to default to being a victim. At some point it becomes more pathetic than sympathetic.
I’m shocked the Sisters never encouraged her to get a job and learn to support herself, not while she was a teen and not after Mario’s accident. I have such a hard time believing the church would pay to not only take care of Mario for the rest of his life but also completely support Dottie. I agree with Magdalena; it’s shady. No way the congregation’s happy knowing their donations are her income. Or so I assume; I don’t pretend to know how a church’s finances work.
There’s so much about Dottie and Mario’s relationship I don’t understand. Why didn’t she work? What did she do all day while he was at work? Same as now, sat at the window and watched the street? Where were his parents? Why didn’t they help Dottie? I don’t remember the narrative mentioning them. And speaking of parents, I don’t understand hers either. Her mom was cuckoo, her dad . . . I have no idea. And one day they just abandoned Dottie without a word? Went to New Mexico to join a cult? And Dottie just accepts that? What the actual fuck?
Benjamin. He and Dottie had an awesome meet-cute. But I found it strange that when he disappeared, Dottie assumed he’d died. She didn’t ask any of the library staff what they knew? She and Benjamin never talked about anything when they were together, just read books aloud and groped under the table? For a year? Never exchanged contact information? Never shared anything about themselves or their lives? How can you get so attached to someone without knowing anything about them? It just struck me as weird that she assumed he was dead. Didn’t ask anyone, didn’t look for him (aside from waiting at the library), didn’t entertain any other scenarios.
Magdalena. Honestly, I didn’t like her much. As with Dottie’s character, I sympathized with the unfortunate circumstances that were out of Magdalena’s control, but aside from that she seemed pretty self-centered. She wanted what she wanted and screw what anyone else thought or wanted. I’m bitter that we aren’t told what happened to her. She went off to Hollywood and—what? How did meeting her mom go? What happened? Did she eventually meet her father or not? Did knowing her parents, or perhaps just being out of Sam’s Town, make her happy? Did she ever come back to see Dottie or Buttons? Dottie’s shown pictures of her looking “vibrant,” but that’s it.
Also, side note: Magdalena had the entire internet at her disposal, and the best remedy for lice she could find was slathering mayo all over her hair? Man, that had to stink.
There’s Cecelia the amiable, companionable ghost, but there’s not much to say about her. She starts out as a plot device and winds up being Dottie’s friend, which is cool. I hate bugs, so I LOVED when Cecelia started killing them all. (Why did Dottie never use insecticides or hire an exterminator? Even just set off a bug bomb? Be a warrior, not a victim, damn it.) I will say the “rules” for ghosts in this world could have been clearer; at first I assumed Cecelia was confined to Dottie’s house, that that was where she’d died, but obviously it couldn’t have been. It took me a while to realize she was apparently free to roam the town once she’d been summoned. And sometimes she didn’t need to be summoned, I guess.
Ringo. Okay, it was cute when he started to bring Dottie gifts. It warmed my heart. Beyond that, I was so frustrated with the whole crow thing. He harassed Dottie because he was trying to convey a message from God that a tree was going to fall on her house? What a crock. If Dottie didn’t want birds harassing her, all she had to do was make noise and reflect light—hang a wind chime and some wads of tin foil or reflective ribbon. DON’T FEED THEM, for shit’s sake. And she was so wrapped up in her obsession that she never once paid attention to the things he was bringing her? Never occurred to her they could be important things, valuable things, things she could be accused of stealing?
Sigh.
The narrative is set in Sam’s Town, an isolated little fishing community on the coast of Northern California. For an unknown reason, death is different in Sam’s Town; ghosts are able to linger. Considering there’s only one ghost in the story, it’s a rather useless explanation that doesn’t actually explain anything. There doesn’t have to be anything special about the town just to have ghosts in it. Nothing else was really done with the ghost element; it was mostly used for atmosphere. Disappointing.
The timeline was slightly wonky. On page five Dottie says she’s 43 years old in present day—except we don’t know exactly when present day is. In 1967, the town experienced a tragic earthquake that killed a bunch of people. Dottie states she was 4 years old at the time. A couple pages later she says “now, over four decades later,” so one would assume the story takes place after 2007 but before 2017. But if Dottie was born in 1963, she’s have been 43 in 2006. If it’s been over 40 years, she should be at least 45 if not older.
What most disoriented me was that the town, at least from Dottie’s perspective, was stuck in the 50s for no particular reason. Despite taking place around 2008-2017, so much was old-fashioned. Dottie’s name, for one. The fact that she wore house dresses and didn’t work. She had a Zenith television when stations were all switching to digital signals, forcing many people to upgrade to flat screens. (In hindsight, I suppose that could be why she only got static most of the time.) Her husband had a transistor radio. When a cell tower was put up in town, it was met with suspicion and fear and disdain. Dottie knew what telephones were, but there was no mention of her having one. No mention of computers or the internet. Dottie acted like they didn’t exist. When Magdalena found information on her phone, Dottie had no idea how the information was there. So I’m to believe she went to the library multiple times a week for years and was never once curious about the computer bank? Was there no technology in the books she read? Come on . . . I get that the town was small and secluded and full of older residents, but it wasn’t frozen in time. They weren’t off the freakin grid.
Overall, a lot of this book didn’t make sense to me. It contained interesting elements, but ultimately I found it weird and unsatisfying. Whatever the author was trying to get across, I’m afraid it went over my head. Sorry to be the one to drag down it’s rating.
Don’t be fooled; this is no horror ghost story. It’s not scary. It’s not even creepy, at least not in the spooky sense. Don’t see “Shirley Jackson” in the promotional material and think you’re in for A Haunting of Hill House (especially not the Netflix version). Nope, if anything’s creepy, it’s Dottie’s obsession with Magdalena.
