As a writer, reading is the most important thing that can be done to improve your craft. Provides a richer well from which to draw (try saying that five times fast). For a long time, I wasn’t reading. Nothing quite gripped me after I stopped reading Rick Riordan’s work religiously. (Funny how he has come up by name twice in a row.) I struggled to get through any long-form fiction until, ironically enough, Aru Shah and the End of Time. What broke me out? The decision to, as much as possible, stop reading fiction written by cisgender heterosexual white people. A choice that has upped my game significantly, both in terms of reading and writing.
Even more so than Aru Shah, Zoraida Cordova’s Labyrinth Lost was the first book that I read in years that felt like the literature that made me care about writing and storytelling. It was adventurous, provocative, and inspiring in all of the ways that I want my YA to be. Labyrinth Lost follows Alejandra Mortiz, a teenager who hates magic in a family of brujas. When her powers manifest, she performs a canto, a spell, to rid herself of them. Only her magic is tied to her family, so they vanish instead. The story unfolds as Alex has to embrace her culture, her magic, the parts of her for which she is most ashamed to get her family back.
The direct relationship between her culture and her magic is what drew me into the book in the first place. It takes the magic of your Harry Potters and other European systems and she filters it through the varying cultures from which the Mortiz girls come.
When I asked her about how she managed reinventing magic through her culture, Cordova said, “As content creators, we have to push ourselves to make something new out of old traditions. I knew that I wanted a magical system inspired by Latinx culture but I wasn't about to invoke a Santeria prayer into my book because that [walks the line] between appreciation and appropriation. I focused on my girls. Who are they? What gods do they pray to? How are they still coded as Latinas? How does their house smell like? What tools do they use to craft their cantos?”
Cordova manages to keep the imagery and magic structure inherently Latinx without it being a specific faith. She deifies the things that are sacred, naming them in Spanish, making cantos the spell work of the community.
With those connections, the story, to some degree, stops being about the magic itself and becomes about the idea of denouncing your cultural identity—a conflict that, I think, lends itself perfectly to the book’s contemporary setting. Growing up in present-day Brooklyn among the Latinx bruja community, Alex is constantly steeped in her culture and seemingly wants out. It isn’t until losing her family that she has to accept her connection to them and to what they are, what she is, and what she cannot help but be.
The direct relationship between her culture and her magic is what drew me into the book in the first place. It takes the magic of your Harry Potters and other European systems and she filters it through the varying cultures from which the Mortiz girls come.
When I asked her about how she managed reinventing magic through her culture, Cordova said, “As content creators, we have to push ourselves to make something new out of old traditions. I knew that I wanted a magical system inspired by Latinx culture but I wasn't about to invoke a Santeria prayer into my book because that [walks the line] between appreciation and appropriation. I focused on my girls. Who are they? What gods do they pray to? How are they still coded as Latinas? How does their house smell like? What tools do they use to craft their cantos?”
Cordova manages to keep the imagery and magic structure inherently Latinx without it being a specific faith. She deifies the things that are sacred, naming them in Spanish, making cantos the spell work of the community.
With those connections, the story, to some degree, stops being about the magic itself and becomes about the idea of denouncing your cultural identity—a conflict that, I think, lends itself perfectly to the book’s contemporary setting. Growing up in present-day Brooklyn among the Latinx bruja community, Alex is constantly steeped in her culture and seemingly wants out. It isn’t until losing her family that she has to accept her connection to them and to what they are, what she is, and what she cannot help but be.
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