Signal to Noise
Silvia
Moreno-Garcia
Meche,
Sebastian, and Daniela are struggling with their social status in high school
in Mexico City in 1988. Meche, fluent in the language of music (one of the few
things she has in common with her father), makes a startling discovery: she can
use music to harm a bully. The manifestation of magic is something she shares
with her grandmother, but their communication is too strained for Meche to
learn from her. Meche realizes that she can feel magic’s power in vinyl, and that
with Sebastian and Daniela’s (sometimes reluctant) help, she can make their
wishes come true—only, not all of their wishes are for good, and the magic
could tear her friendships apart.
Interspersed
with the scenes of 1988 are scenes of Meche’s return to the city in 2009 after
a long absence. She has come to mourn her father, not to mend old wounds.
Still, she can’t escape the evidence of her past, and all of the feelings and
memories that come with having had a taste of magic.
While
music is an important theme in Signal to
Noise, I was fascinated by the oft-ignored theme of magic with consequences.
Here, magic complicates what is already complicated. I particularly want to
chew on the idea of failure, too—failure to reach across generations and
friendship fault lines, and what happens when people fail to pass on important
information, leaving the followers to draw conclusions that aren’t always kind,
or true, or fully understood. Failure to see the outcome of actions. Failure to
find self-realization. Still, all of the failures lead to bittersweet
reckoning.
If
none of this hooks you, consider Signal
to Noise for Meche, its angry, flawed heroine. She’s a character you’ll
want to both comfort and unravel. –Undusty New Books
One
other thought that is far enough removed from the book and its contents that I wanted to mention
it separately from the review: this book came from Solaris, a UK imprint. I
kept getting snagged on a handful of words that felt very British, and “which”
where I expected “that” (US and UK usage differs considerably; the UK uses
which in restrictive situations, whereas the US does not, except when we get
confused about grammar or, sometimes, want to try to sound smart and don’t know
the difference). I do read books in other Englishes, and like them; why should
I expect a book in English that is set in Mexico (and that in my head is taking
place in Spanish, just in some way that I can understand completely) to use US
English? Something for me to think about, as I often have stopped reading books
in translation, finding them flat and dry (and wondering if they were vibrant
originals), and have stopped reading books because of, say, punctuation
dissonance (I’m thinking of Born Confused,
which I’d actually really like to finish someday—maybe I need to audiobook it—but
always end up putting down because the dashes feel like smacks to the brain,
and I can’t muster the sustained energy to read it in one go and remember what’s
going on). Always the struggle between want to read and enjoy reading, between
push self and find comfort, between seeking familiarity and novelty, perhaps.
