I’m so glad I read this book in time for book club because it warrants all the breaking down with a group. I was shocked at the number of details I missed from this book, which is just barely over 200 pages but takes FULL advantage of each of those pages with absolutely no paragraph breaks and a relentless stream of page-long run-on sentences that make my ever lengthy sentences look like single words. I knew going into this novel that it was about the death of a local witch in a small impoverished Mexican village, and I knew that it wasn’t really going to be about the witch. Somehow I still expected it to be a bit more about the witch though, if that makes any sense. Jessica describes her as “a character you somehow know less about at the end of the book than the beginning”, which is so apt. This is an intense and difficult read, with a lot of bleakness and almost certainly more to say than I was able to hear, but I’m so glad I read it. I am gonna be processing this one for a while yet.⁣
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Cw for violence, murder, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, homophobia, transphobia, slurs, drug addiction, pretty much the works.