Review: Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Photo by Sebastian Coman Travel on Unsplash
Synopsis:
Baja California, 1979. Viridiana spends her days watching the dead sharks piled beside the seashore, as the fishermen pull their nets. Her head is filled with dreams of Hollywood, of romance, of a future beyond the town where her only option is to marry and have children. But then three wealthy American tourists arrive for the summer, and Viridiana is magnetized. She immediately becomes entwined in the excitement of the glamorous foreigners’ lives and an escape from the promise of a humdrum future.
When one of them dies, Viridiana lies to protect her friends. Soon enough, someone’s asking questions, and Viridiana has some of her own about her new acquaintances. Sharks may be dangerous, but there are worse predators nearby, ready to devour a naive young woman who becomes tangled in a web of deceit. In her first crime novel, Silvia Moreno-Garcia crafts a blazing novel of suspense with an eerie seaside setting and a literary edge that proves her a master of the genre.
Content Warning: violence, domestic abuse.
A deeply suspenseful and atmospheric read.
One thing I love about reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books is that they’re all so different from each other. The one thing they have in common is that at its core, each story is about a young woman growing up and finding her voice. And while Untamed Shore is a noir crime drama, it’s really more about Viridiana and her desperate attempts to escape the trappings of small town life.
This book is slow to start, but that’s because Moreno-Garcia takes the time to really set the scene. The way she describes Desengaño, the stiflingly small town on the coast of Baja California, is vivid and detailed; I could almost smell the salt in the air, feel the dry wind brushing through my hair, and hear the whispers of gossip behind my back. (Note: “desengaño” actually means disappointment in Spanish, which is apt.) And because Moreno-Garcia has described what the town is like, you can begin to really sympathize with Viridiana’s dreams of finding a life of her own, and you can truly understand why she feels compelled to make the choices she did.
“She couldn’t let go now, she didn’t want to. Her heart wouldn’t take it. Without him, what did she have? Nothing but that damned and endless desert outside that wanted to eat her alive.”
That being said, I didn’t quite fall in love with Viridiana the way I instantly did with Casiopeia or Noemí—from Gods of Jade and Shadow and Mexican Gothic, respectively; I found her to be a little distant and cold, especially in the beginning. Her reaction to some of the things that happened was oddly phlegmatic. But the journey that Garcia-Moreno takes her on is so compelling that I grew to like her as the story progressed.
“She had learned to put on a performance and realized it would serve her in the future.”
Viridiana is only eighteen years old, and has lived a very sheltered life. Her only connection to the outside world is through the black-and-white movies she’s seen at the drive-in. Because of this, she often sees her life as though she’s in a movie, and she frequently quotes lines from her favorite scenes—I used to do this all the time when I was younger, and I frequently got the same reaction she did, which is “What?” So I loved seeing someone else do the same thing (It also made me feel like less of a weirdo).
I don’t really want to go into too much detail about the other characters, because I don’t want to give away any spoilers. But I highly recommend this book, and everything else that Moreno-Garcia has written. She’s the master of versatility.