In the immortal words of RuPaul, “Meh.”

This book wasn’t horrible. It’s a family epic set across 2+ generations of a wealthy family in Mexico. I love a multi-generational epic. And the book had the checklist of magical realism moments and mysterious characters with occasional supernatural powers. I also loved the character of Simonopio a boy with a cleft palate who lives his life surrounded by bees.

Unfortunately it was only this one character that kept me moving forward to finish the book. In my opinion the story would have come through more if it had a strong editor working with the author. There were a lot of extra words that neither moved the story forward, nor were particularly beautiful prose. And the class privilege of the family this story centered on was regularly acknowledged but ultimately the author took the stance of “these are kindly landowners and some servants are loyal and others bad.” At no point did the servant characters get any real development. The translator even used the word peons to describe them. Possible she was using this as a pseudo channeling of how the characters themselves thought but it didn’t come across as clearly intentional.

I hadn’t read magical realism in many years and I was excited by this translation that was released earlier this year and an author I hadn’t read before. But ultimately this one didn’t capture me as much as I’d hoped.

Cross posted from my #bookstagram: @brianreadsbooks