This is one of those books I'm not sure a review can enable to grasp. It is huge in size & scope, and yet it doesn't feel that because you follow a small number of characters and it's mostly a family story. But it also touches on so, so many themes as well as a complex historical background (Argentinian history) that I knew nothing about.

The book opens with a father and son on the run from a cult. I was immediately put in mind of one of my favourite movies, Midnight Special by Jeff Nichols, and so I started on relative familiar ground, which helped a lot. Of course, the particulars of this story are very different. Rather than the boy, it's the father who seems to have some sort of supernatural abilities. They are fleeing across Argentina in the early 1980s, in which monsters are both the political sort and the nightmare sort. 

I was recommended this book by a librarian who said that I would be less taken aback by the fantastical elements given that I'm mostly a reader of fantasy & science-fiction, rather than contemporary literature. On the one hand I agree, I can quite easily suspend my disbelief, as the saying goes, but the supernatural is very much on the nightmare side of things in this book and so I'm sure readers of more classical fiction can absolutely read it. That being said, it is a grim, creepy and deeply uneasy novel. At some point I was wondering if the author had a bingo chart of content warnings and was trying to put them all in. But that is due to the nightmare-like nature of the story, so although I did not enjoy it, it didn't feel gratuitous.

If you enjoyed it, you might enjoy The Bone People by Keri Hulme for the relationship between father and son, the importance of Indigenous communities, and the overall uneasiness & darkness of the book.

Rep: bisexual MC. 

Content warnings not available in the list: mutilation, the AIDS epidemic.