A stepmother takes the clean cloth the family’s tortillas are kept in, unwraps it in front of her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter as though she means to hand one over, and instead counts them. Eight. She says the number out loud, wraps the cloth again, and holds the girl’s eye. If there are not eight in the morning, there will be welts across the backs of the girl’s legs. This is the household Minerva Treviño runs away from in the first chapter of The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas, and it matters later, because when somebody is finally decent to her she has no idea what to do with it.
Who Isabel Cañas Puts at the Centre
The girl talks her way into a job as lady’s maid to Encarnación del Valle, an elderly woman rattling around a decaying mansion on the capital’s grandest avenue, abandoned by relatives whose portraits she curses every morning over her chocolate.
Encarnación is appalling. She belongs to the deposed Viceroy’s family and thinks the elected president is riffraff. She uses a word for the country’s dark-skinned majority, which includes the girl dressing her, that the novel does not soften. When the president is shot she opens champagne and toasts the dead. She is vain, imperious, self-pitying and bored.
She is also the only person who has ever taken care of Minerva. And she thanks her every night for not leaving. She makes her read aloud from encyclopedias and obituaries and corrects her without being unkind about it. She warns her, matter of factly, that she will not live forever and the girl will need a better family afterwards. And she teaches her a board game, beats her eight times running, then dismisses a famous strategist as a coward because the game is about the pursuit of victory and the author had clearly never wanted anything.
This is what The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas is actually about, and it is a braver subject than the haunting. What do you owe someone whose kindness is real and whose politics would have had you killed? The novel never answers. It just keeps the question in the room.
The Ghost, and What He Wants
Halfway through, the army overthrows the government and the household flees to la Casa de las Gardenias, the family’s mountaintop fortress above the valley, reached by a road that scrapes the undercarriage off a carriage.
The house has a fourth floor with no staircase, an echo on the stairs that only Minerva hears, and a resident. Ygnacio narrates every other chapter. He was taken from a burning village as a child, roped and driven up this mountain to build this house, crushed by its own stone, and tipped into a pit at the edge of the garden without a prayer said over him. And he has been here ever since, unable to cross a line two steps beyond the grounds.
He is not a sympathetic ghost pretending to be frightening. He is predatory, he is starving, and the opening section is him selecting a living person to manipulate into murder on his behalf. The novel’s cleverest structural decision is that his narration is unreliable about exactly one thing: her.
And then there is the question of what the lamps in this world actually run on. A golden substance called chispa lights every wealthy house, heats the water, drives the presses and loads the guns, and it comes out of a single mine that Minerva’s father works. What it really is, and where it really comes from, is the discovery The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas is built around, and it turns the whole book from a gothic into something considerably angrier about the Viceroyalty it is plainly modelled on.
Where The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas Falls Short
Four reservations, and one of them is practical.
- The romance is underfed. Minerva and Ygnacio go from a knife at his throat to lying side by side on a made bed in two scenes, and the final chapter leans on that bond harder than the preceding three hundred pages have earned.
- The war is a diagram. Loyalists and insurgents, a viceroy and a president, and no sense of how either would govern. One character’s elevation at the end is asserted in three pages.
- The young del Valle son has a single note. Cruelty, pinned insects, bottled venoms, assaults on the maids, one bullet a day. He is genuinely alarming and completely flat, and the chapter that might have complicated him never arrives.
- The age banding is arguable. It is published for fourteen and up, and The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas contains a four-page poisoning, a flogging, prison rape stated plainly, and an ending that gives no quarter. Read the notes below before putting it in a teenager’s hands, or some adults’.
For the Group
Lead with Encarnación, because nothing else in The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas will produce a better hour. Ask the room whether her kindness counts. Then narrow it: she is kind to one girl she has decided belongs to her, and contemptuous of everyone who looks like that girl. Is that kindness, patronage or ownership? Then the hardest version: Minerva is grateful, and the novel plainly thinks she is right to be. Does the group agree?
Then Ygnacio, and who the monster is. His grievance is complete and legitimate: abducted, worked to death, dumped. He also spends the book trying to get a sixteen-year-old to kill for him, and feeding on the dying. Ask whether being wronged on that scale buys him anything. The book deliberately does not take a side.
Then the title question nobody expects. The household never once talks about the dead it is standing on, and it is the servants, the miners and the murdered who keep saying the same seven-word blessing over a knotted thread. By the final act, that blessing turns up in the mouth of the man whose family stole the mountain. Ask what it means that the colonisers took the protective rite too, and notice that The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas never explains the joke out loud.
Content notes, which the book does not provide: a father who beats his children with a belt and throws one against a wall; a stepmother who withholds food and beats her stepdaughter over a missing tortilla; hunger, and a girl scavenging a tip among feral dogs; a teenage servant groped by her employer’s son, with clear evidence of worse done to another girl; a long, graphic poisoning death; political killings, firing squads, people vanished by the state, prisoners tortured in a fortress and raped there, their babies handed to loyalist families, all chatted about over needlework; a servant flogged raw and another executed; a person locked in a livestock cage; a blade held to a throat until it bleeds; a woman set alight; a shooting at close range; alcoholism. The ending is not a happy one.
More for the group: The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas is her most recent adult novel and the obvious companion read, House of Splinters by Laura Purcell suits a group that came for the architecture, Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker is the pick if you want another haunting with its own cultural rules, and The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy works if the house itself was the draw.
What It Leaves Behind
The thing a group will carry out of the room is a servant’s view of a great house. Cañas is exact about it: a wall of bells labelled by floor so staff know whose summons is whose, a fixed order for turning down bedrooms, a back staircase the lower servants must use so the family never sees them, a protocol about which spoon goes where. Liveried footmen look down on maids. Maids look down on stable hands. Nobody looks up.
That is why the ghost works. He laid the floorboards that the dancers are dancing on and spread the mortar in the walls, and he watched a century of parties from a ceiling corner, and his body is still in the garden. The haunting in The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas is not a metaphor for labour. It is the labour, still in the building, still unpaid, and still keeping the lamps on. Bring it to a group that does not mind an evening without a comfortable answer, because this book has not got one and is not pretending otherwise.