Rose Lane passes for white, owns a jazz club, and can charm just about anyone with a touch.By day, she is a part-time columnist for a local Kansas City newspaper. She is also Luna Alvarado, a half-Mexican bruja whose powers are slight. Her abuela keeps assuring her that she will grow into her full powers.

Rose is ambitious; she wants to break free from the local mobsters and truly own her own club. As she works toward her goals, the different parts of her life keep colliding. It is exhausting keeping so many secrets.

Jazz Age Kansas City magic. Loved how the novel included a lot of Spanish and a lot of 1920s slang without any explandation/translation/dictionary.

Read ARC from Edelweiss ( )

Mixed review. At first I almost gave up as it looked like this was going to be a hot and heavy soft porn, but I kept going on the cover blurb promise of Luna/Rose learning to use her magic. The tale deals with a lot of vices being catered to, and the only method Rose knows of (at first) of using her magic is thru skin contact & kissing. I didn't want to read a book which focuses on alcohol consumption & the basis that making a profit as a nightclub owner is the only way Rose can get what she wants in this world. Too often it seems her motive is to 'make it to the top', and only rarely do we hear her say it's to help her family--and it's becomes apparent that her motive is only to help her nuclear family financially, not to pave the way for other Mexican immigrants.
The story also challenges our prejudices as it portrays the underbelly of high society in Kansas City during Prohibition. Mesa makes ancestral heritage prejudice look silly almost immediately as one Italian mobster comments "wait boss, aren't we immigrants too?" The portrayal of Black/White prejudices aren't as strongly earmarked as the races are integrated in her staff and we're only occasionally reminded of which race any character is.
Mesa includes a subtheme of feminist history, details of how limited the passing of the Right to Vote was. Women still couldn't take out loans or make legal contracts without a male co-signer. Women were still under the thumb of their spouses. The character carrying this message, Margaret, was not all that appealing, but with the help of Rose's reading of her thoughts & feelings we gain a bit of understanding.
I hated how increasingly often Rose turned to alcohol to relax or forget her problems, and that this was never acknowledged as a problem.
By the end, however, we did get some good descriptive writing about how it felt for Rose/Luna to connect with her magic power. ( )

Mesa, Desideria. Bindle Punk Bruja. Harper Voyager, 2022.
Bindle Punk Bruja, Desideria Mesa’s historical fantasy, brings together a prohibition-era gangster story set in the mean streets of Kansas City, an immigrant passing drama, and some earth-magic witchcraft. Luna, called Rose professionally, is an immigrant girl anxious to move her family out of an abandoned boxcar. She can pass for white and runs a successful speakeasy, despite harassment from cops, the local mob, the KKK, and moral crusaders. The women in her family are adept at earth magic—if she touches you, she can sense your emotions and intentions. Her magical glamor gives her impressive powers of seduction. Minor characters are usually well-drawn, though some of the villains are a little flat. I prefer Christopher Moore’s less serious Noir series, but that may be an apples-and-oranges comparison. 4 stars. ( )

It has been a long time since I’ve come upon a book that I knew was not going to get better no matter how much I read of it. I was really looking forward to this one since there is so much about it that I normally enjoy; the 1920’s, magic, history, and Latinx characters.

To start off it was so depressing and really hit one in the face with Luna being out of sorts with her family and the rest of her world because of her lighter skin. And then it jumped from depressing to confusing. There are so many issues that are being tackled that it felt as if the author wanted to throw all of her opinions and research into one book in case this is the only one that she wrote. There are also so many questions that don’t get answered especially when it comes to the magic aspect.

There is just too much going on in Bindle Punk Bruja. If Desideria Mesa had decided to turn this into a four or five book series (even with spin-offs of some of the characters, like Heck), I could see it turning out really well. Or maybe even changing it to a historical novel since there is so much research done. Or switch it to fantasy or a story with magical realism… I don’t know. Lots of potential, but her editors let her down on this one. ( )