Signal to Noise | ARC Review – A Dance With Books

Thank you to Rebellion and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway.

Mexico City, 1988: Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said “I love you” with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, has two equally unhip friends — Sebastian and Daniela — and a whole lot of vinyl records to keep her company. When she discovers how to cast spells using music, the future looks brighter for the trio. With help from this newfound magic, the three friends will piece together their broken families, change their status as non-entities, and maybe even find love…

Mexico City, 2009: Two decades after abandoning the metropolis, Meche returns for her estranged father’s funeral. It’s hard enough to cope with her family, but then she runs into Sebastian, and it revives memories from her childhood she thought she buried a long time ago. What really happened back then? What precipitated the bitter falling out with her father? And, is there any magic left?

Over the last few years I’ve been reading a bit of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work. And as I have noticed I have quite a bit of a preference for her newer work over her older work. So when I got the e-arc of this rerelease of Signal to Noise (originally released in 2015) I was a bit hesitant going in. I ended up really liking it.

Signal to noise is a combination of nostalgia, music and growing up that weaves the tale of Meche. We meet her as she returns home for the funeral of her father, someone who she has very mixed feelings about. Returning home sets up the rememberance of her time as a 15 year old, when she first discovered the magic of some music with her two friends.

The way the story is build up between the present and the past works well. We see Meche dealing with her grief over her father. A grief she is trying not to have because of what he did. She is working through his stuff and remembering what happened. And it helps to show not everything is as black and white as she thought. Not just her father but the falling out with her friends. Its someting she never really worked through but that she ran from.

It is just a beautiful self-contained story of the mistakes we sometimes make and how to deal with the fall out, even if it has been 20+ years.