After her father dies, Casiopea Tun and her mother move back to their native Mayan town of Uukumil in the Yucatán, where she grows up as an unwanted poor relation in her wealthy grandfather's house.

Bound to Casiopea, the god enlists her in his quest to regain his missing body parts, which his twin brother and rival Vucub-Kamé has scattered throughout Mexico and left in the keeping of sorcerers, demons, and other supernatural entities.

The root of the gods’ rivalry lies in Vucub-Kamé's lust to restore the bloody sacrifices and glories of Mayan and Aztec times, which Hun-Kamé is content to leave in the past.

Their rivalry ends with both their mortal proxies consigned to Xibalba for a deceptively simple contest: walking the Black Road to the Jade Palace, with the lives of the twin death gods and the fate of the world as the stakes.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly states the author "crafts a magical novel of duality, tradition, and change ... Moreno-Garcia's seamless blend of mythology and history provides a ripe setting for Casiopea's stellar journey of self-discovery, which culminates in a dramatic denouement.

"[2][3] Shelley M. Diaz in Library Journal calls the book "a stirring historical fantasy set in the Roaring Twenties and steeped in Mayan mythology.

Lavish clothes; jazzy music; and ruminations on life, death, fate, and the cosmos combine with blood-drenched nightmares, grisly religious rituals, and road-trip high jinks.

It may be too much to talk about Gods of Jade and Shadow and, say, Aliette de Bodard's Servant of the Underworld trilogy as trailblazers of Mesoamerican fantasy, but they are certainly part of a larger upwelling of indigenous American themes and settings in the genre—Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World series being another recent, excellent example.

Although pre-Columbian mythology and magic and the Roaring Twenties may seem like a strange combination, in Moreno-Garcia's hands they comprise an enchanting cocktail, just as Casiopea's unsentimental view on her story is the perfect counterpart to its fantastic and at times hair-raising events.