For most of her life, Cecilia’s mother has jumped from rich man to rich man, pulling her daughter along in her wake. When Ceci’s latest wealthy stepdad is arrested and she and her mother lose everything, her mother takes them back to the town she grew up in. Santa Aguas is a nothing town in the middle of nowhere. Her mom ended up there in the care of a tough-as-nails aunt after immigrating from Nicaragua, but left right after high school. It’s a big shift from cosmopolitan Miami to dirt roads and one rundown grocery store, but Ceci adjusts quickly. New friends, a new cute boy, and her artwork keep her occupied. That and the local legend about La Cegua, the woman in white with the skull of a horse for a face who disappears bad men.
Ceci and her mom move into the Sevilla mansion, a manor house that had been abandoned for years, since not long after the disappearance of Roman Sevilla nearly two decades before. As soon as she arrives, Ceci knows something is wrong about the place. Hidden rooms, strange whispering, and unsettling photographs of Sevilla men haunt her. But the weirdest thing is the well she and Jamie find in the woods behind a magical door, the same door she had been painting months before she had even heard of Santa Aguas. Something dark and terrible lurks at the bottom of that well, something connected to Ceci and her mother, something that wants revenge. The magic of the well grants wishes, but not without too many strings attached. The more Ceci wishes, the worse things get. Now she’s trapped in a web of lies, and the price to escape may be too much for her to bear.
This book is marketed as horror, but I’m hard pressed to agree. Horror is one of my favorite genres in young adult fiction, so I read a lot of it. I’ve read every kind of YA horror at this point, from the books so intense I have to keep putting the book down to so light the horror is mostly just a looming tension in the background. These Vengeful Wishes has such a light touch when it comes to horror elements that it feels more like dark fantasy. With a premise as creepy as a vengeful spirit with the face of a horse skull killing her enemies, I expected the book to be much scarier. Every time the plot opened up an opportunity for terror, it backed away into a friendship and romance. Readers coming into this wanting horror horror should adjust their expectations.
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These Vengeful Wishes
Other than that, These Vengeful Wishes was a captivating novel. Among other themes, the story focuses much of its energy on exploring generational trauma and toxic masculinity. La Cegua was created through the violence of toxic masculinity and perpetuated through generational trauma. With Ceci and Jamie in particular, we see how their parents’ traumas trickle down onto their children. Neither Jamie’s father nor Ceci’s mother are outright abusive on the page, but as Ceci notes, “Abuse isn’t always loud or physical. Sometimes it’s a barb-wired whisper.” They are passing down their pain onto their children instead of processing it themselves. Ceci has already let it sour her relationships; she refuses to commit to romantic relationships and chooses friends from classmates she doesn’t like in order to not risk getting hurt emotionally. It’s up to Ceci and Jamie to finally break the cycle.
Complicating matters is that much of that generational trauma is infected by toxic masculinity. The Sevilla men have been dying young from La Cegua’s curse for as long as they’ve been the worst the patriarchy has to offer. There’s a long history of Sevilla men abusing their privileges over the women in their lives, particularly when those women have browner skin than they do. Without spoiling anything, Ceci gets pulled into this cycle of patriarchal violence but is at least aware enough to know what she’s getting into and how to fight her way out.
The town of Santa Aguas is set in Central Florida, and Montalban does a good job of connecting the present to the past. Florida was first colonized by the Spanish in the early 16th century. The viceroyalty of New Spain would eventually extend west to California and across the Pacific to the Philippines and islands in the South Pacific, east to the Caribbean Sea, south into northern South America, and as far north as Alaska. Florida became a United States territory in 1821. In the book, the first Sevilla travels from California (presumably Alta California) to La Florida. I appreciated the historical ties, especially the way Montalban made the connection between historical Spanish colonization and the modern-day ripple effects. This isn’t a story explicitly about colonization, colorism, and racism, but they do play important parts in the creation of La Cegua and Ceci and her mother’s struggles with the Sevilla family.
The woman in white is a well-known urban legend, and Vanessa Montalban cleverly blends her with a vengeful spirit horror trope and Nicaraguan folklore. If horrormance is a thing now, then These Vengeful Wishes is a good example. Full of charm and chills, this young adult novel is hard to put down.
These Vengeful Wishes is published by Zando Young Readers.
