The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It's always frustrating to see the author whose work you really liked to begin with go awry. Yet, it seems like an apt way to describe Moreno=Garcia's trajectory, given her recent track record.
She started off so strong fresh out of the gate and then began to veer into romance and fantasy and all that popular garbage out there.

With this book, it seems that she has tried to go back to something like Mexican Gothic but failed somewhere along the way.  Between the writing so flat and twee that it makes me question if her earlier work was actually good or if I was a less demanding reader then, the uneven weaving of three timelines (where it should have likely been two), and the truly cringe romance aspects, including a potent current of incest (sexy uncle), this was a very long 368 pages.

Moreno-Garcia has been plying the same formula steadily for years now - female protagonists and Mexican angle. A rather extreme case of "write what you know" that has worked well, but it makes you question whether the author wants to or even can do anything else? One may also question how much of this recent underwhelming work has been pandering to the market inexplicably and tragically gung-ho for romance and fantasy and the abominable portmanteau of both. 
Either way, the result leaves much to be desired. This book is readable. She can do that much well enough by now.  I enjoyed how dark her take on witches is and the few nice surprises toward the end, so I'll rate it generously. Tis the season and all.  But I am disappointed. Thanks Netgalley.