TL;DR Puerto Rican magical realism
TBR #906, added Jun 23 2014
finished 7/5/16
I'm a complete sucker for magical realism / urban fantasy, so I was excited to get my hands on this. I was also really curious about Puerto Rico, since we passed up our chance to go in December.
The worldbuilding was definitely strong in that I had a clear picture of all of the settings, which is usually pretty rare for me. I normally can't keep a good mental picture of book settings without any pictures. (I'm pitiful.) As for the magical realism ...
I can say it gave me the same vibe as Like Water for Chocolate, which I read in my AP Spanish class junior year. However, we read it entirely in Spanish, and as a non-native speaker a lot of the book went way over my head. (Our teacher also didn't explain it was magical realism, so I was "???" most of the time. I just read the Wikipedia page and am even more confused.) Anyway, my point is that I feel like the magic aspect of Isabel wasn't used as much as it could have.
(Maybe the point of magical realism is to leave the magical aspect as a complete mystery? I don't know. I don't have a very good track record with the genre so far.)
The characters were interesting, but I honestly was ever attached to Marisol, and half of that was because of the events of the book. (I feel really weird for admitting that.) I liked that the main character was a guy, and I thought he was written well, but he was also really impulsive and kind of hard to connect with. I didn't agree with the direction he took in the second half of the book. His friends also weren't the greatest people in the world, though to their defense they only ever saw Lucas for like three months out of the year, so I figured they weren't tight-knit with him.
The end of the book felt kind of anticlimactic after all the drama / action in the middle of the book, and I didn't have any of my questions answered by the end. The story just kind of stops and then picks up with a small epilogue that still doesn't answer anything I was curious about.
Even with all that, though, I still rated the book 4 stars. The aesthetic is strong and it did live up to the creepy vibe I was getting from the blurb without being a suspense book. (I'm a baby. This book met the higher end of my creepy-tolerance scale.) It does also have a good mystery aspect, especially if you don't mind when things are still left open by the time the narration finishes. It kept me interested enough to finish when I haven't managed to finish the other four library books I've now renewed twice.
TL;DR I'm not really sure what my final feelings are on the book between the magical realism and the ending, but I definitely think it's worth a try if you like mystery and / or unsettling aesthetics.
No comments:
Post a Comment