He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.
“Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.
“Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.
“Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.” [loc. 983]
It's 2009, and IT professional Meche is returning to Mexico City for the first time in twenty years, to attend her father's funeral. It's 1988, and Meche is 15, hanging out with literature-mad Sebastian and young-for-her-age Daniela, and discovering that the three of them can do magic. Alternating between the two timelines, Signal to Noise is the story of what went wrong between Meche and Sebastian, Meche and her parents, Meche and herself.
This was Moreno-Garcia's first novel, and features some predictable plot elements and occasional clunky sentences. We never get an explanation of the magic, or why only some records (physical records! those round things!) work as magical foci. And I'd have liked more about the grandmother's history, and her sacrifice. But I liked the atmosphere of a Mexico City high school; the way that music twines through the story; the relationship between Meche and Sebastian, and the uncomfortable dynamics of Meche's family; the way that the past must be faced before it can be left behind.
I bought this in September 2020, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.
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