These Vengeful Wishes by Vanessa Montalban

ARC, 320 pages
Release Date: February 4, 2025
Published by: Zando Young Readers
Read from: January 10- February 20, 2025
Stand-alone
Source: I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a just and honest review.
Content Warning: Alcoholism, Body Horror, Death, Blood, Injury/Injury Detail, Racism, Toxic Friendship, Toxic Relationship, Car Accident 
For Readers Interested In: ARCs, Fantasy, Horror, Sparkly Cover, Most Anticipated, Racial/Ethnic Diversity (Latinx- Nicaraguan), ToB 2025?, YA 

      A teen girl moves to a small town and discovers a mysterious wishing well possessed by La Cegua, a vengeful female spirit with the face of a horse skull, in Vanessa Montalban’s new YA fantasy standalone.
     When her stepfather is arrested, aspiring artist Ceci moves back to her mother’s hometown of Santa Aguas, an eccentric small town steeped in the legend of La Cegua, the specter of a wronged witch who appears on lonely roads at night, luring untrustworthy men to their deaths.
     Ceci and her mother take up residence in the abandoned manor of the Sevilla family, rumored to have been cursed by La Cegua, where she begins to uncover a past that seems to be connected to her mother. The more she learns of the Sevillas, the more Ceci finds herself forming a strange affinity with the feared Cegua, who she suspects is the one inspiring her paintings of a mysterious door in the forest.
     When the very door Ceci has been painting appears in the woods, she decides to venture through it with her new friend, Jamie. Together, they discover a well, guarded by the statue of a veiled woman. A well for granting wishes. The well of La Cegua.
     What starts off as harmless fun quickly escalates into something sinister when Ceci realizes that the wishes are putting the people she loves in danger and testing her own penchant for vengeance. After learning others are also searching for the well, Ceci must confront the truth of her mother’s past and prevent La Cegua’s wishes from being used for the wrong reasons. Ceci knows too well how much people will sacrifice for power. Every wish has its price, and La Cegua never forgets the ones who have wronged her.

*MY THOUGHTS*

It didn’t take much for me to add this to my TBR. I think I saw the cover and that was enough. Afterwards I immediately went to Google to find the legend of La Cegua. I needed to know everything that I could about it. And now that I’ve finished it, I can say it was absolutely warranted.

Ok so this is a very slow, slow burn. There’s a lot of explanation and there’s a lot of story filling, but not that many scary bits. I know that’s a me thing, but I just feel like if you’re going to make it a slow burn, put some stuff in there to make it so that I don’t look away. You have to make it thrilling in some other way. And that’s what she did. The weird stuff with the town on down to just the descriptions of La Cegua. It was all weird lol

The characters were what threw me off the most in this book. I get that there was some extra weird going on here, but the thing with the boy? Ol dude fell hard and fast and left all common sense there lol And like she was so mean? So many of those things she was doing I kept thinking like wtf lol All the lying and the way she just made her own decisions with no regard to anyone else was sending me. Idk. I’m not usually a fan of morally gray, so maybe this is just me. But yeah, I was not a fan. (Especially since the person who SHOULD have gotten got only got a small taste because her mom kept going to visit him! she should have left him where they were lol)

And just as a heads up, this was pitched to me as a horror book and I think with me thinking of La Cegua and what the overall theme was, I had an idea on how this was going to go. But it’s more fantasy than anything. The horror is more gothic horror so I would actually call this a gothic fantasy. I’m just trying to clarify, because I think if I had been told it was fantasy, I would have rated it higher.

This book was a lot of fun, but it didn’t come without flaws. I definitely enjoyed it. I hope to see more of this later. Seeing culture in horror or just spooky books in general is EVERYTHING to me. And the author is such a wonderful human. I can’t wait to see more of this in the future.

Overall, I give this