Mirror Marked by Vida Cruz-Borja
Publisher - PS Publishing
Published - Out Now
Price - £18 hardback ebook to come
Old, rich, and deeply rooted in witchcraft, the Petronio family's youngest daughter is getting married. There's just one problem: the mother of the bride, Mutya, is an evil witch—and she's out for vengeance.
Kelly hasn't been planning weddings for very long, but she takes the job despite her misgivings. However, the wedding will be taking place at Chateau Petronio, where her film director father once tried and failed to shoot a horror film. Where Kelly, at the age of eight, came across a mirror that enabled her to See the Unseen and changed her life. Suddenly, she's not so sure the Petronios picked her just for her resume. With the help of a motley crew of witches, can she defend the wedding from Mutya, solve the mystery behind the mirror, and impress the bride's attractive older sister Marga—all in one night?
Where does a story begin? Easy answer - page 1 but stories often are twisty things where we discover character’s motivations and the wider plots are told often out of order - books can indeed be timey-wimey. In Vida Cruz-Borja’s deliciously smart fantasy novella Mirror Marked we go to the modern day Philippines for a wealthy family’s history to be unpicked but also a great example of exploring a character which really plays to the novella’s strengths as a format for storytelling.
Kelly is an up and coming wedding planner rebuilding her life. She also has the Sight and can see the supernatural world which is useful as upsetting the wrong spirits or entity of the Philippine’s supernatural world can be very dangerous and have repercussions for a happy couple. She has now been hired by the wealthy Petronio family as part of a team of magical guardians to ensure they don’t get impacted by the most magical threat the family know - the bride’s mother Mutya a woman known for just taking what she wants at the expense of her children. Kelly though is trouble as the Petronio house is reminding her of an incident when she was eight visiting there as a child of a famous director that perhaps started her journey into the magical realms.
Cruz-Borja throws us in the first few pages into a magical conflict as Kelly is up against Mutya. It’s a scene filled with menace, spectacle and little explanation but we want to know more and so we have then a fascinating bit of storytelling. Our narrator jumps back from this tense scene to give us a flashback and then we get more and more. We get to see the events leading up to this magical battle, we get to know the characters we just met and what I really appreciated was Cruz-Borja’s ability in each scene to flesh out how this supernatural world developed. Why Mutya is such a threat and how all the dynamics of the cast interact. This world as the wider young cast are all quite adorable - they’re kind, geeky, queer and supportive doing their jobs or in the case of the Petronio sisters we meet not lording it about as wealthy scions.
They are the initial stakes of the story and we want them to succeed and not get hurt. The magical legends and powers we see are all fascinating and give the world a sense of depth. We even get detours into history (modern and much older) looking at film culture, how witches are treated and much more. A short story hasn’t got the range for this kind of exploration, a novel would require lots more chapters and characters to really flesh the take out and there is then the risk that it gets over-complicated but this instead works with every page counting to the story - adding clues, building up people and then in the most impressive way possible we find out this is far more Kelly’s story than we realised.
Initially we think this is more a modern urban style fantasy story of wedding planners versus magical witch which it is is but Cruz-Borja’s treat for the reader is actually making us delve into the main character. Kelly is quite shy, not the leader of the pack but kind. Slowly we find out how she grew up and it’s a heart wrenching tale of neglect and a daughter being told to fit one mould set by her mother and yet it’s not her. I love that exploration we get and there is pain, sorrow and the fact that Kelly keeps moving on is empowering. We also get the clues that the Petronio family and Kelly’s past are intertwined which adds again to the depth of stakes here. This isn’t just about saving a wedding any more it’s about Kelly facing her past. The way Cruza-Borja does that is fascinating on multiple levels and this story has a great use of second person as Kelly is trapped from that first scene in this flashback within flashback sequence echoing someone standing between mirrors and seeing all aspects of her life brining her to this very moment. Again the novella format works so well here as we find out the true focus is Kelly and having such an interesting character unpeeled in this way really works by the end we see her in so many ways she really feel a fully formed human being doing one of the hardest things we do in life. Taking a good hard look at who we really are,
Mirror Marked offers magic, spectacle, humour but also depth, character exploration and emotional stakes that combine into exquisite storytelling. Fans of novellas should definitely ensure they pick this up for a very rewarding reading experience. Strongly recommended!
