internationalreads's Reviews (1.69k)

This book is FUNNY which made me power through this far, but I can’t do it anymore. It’s clear the author is familiar with the UN “peacebuilding” world (as am I), but all of the characters need more development. They are completely flat stereotypes, to the point of cringe. The bleeding heart who can’t let anything go, the misogynist himbo head of security, the woman in charge trying to prove herself, the French gay man sleeping with locals. The last straw for me was when he did a slut drop on the dance floor. Don’t even get me started on Sheikh Jason.

There’s a certain bro-y type of humor happening that I can’t put up with for another 700 pages. One example: there’s no reason to use the R word, even satirically. 

Entertaining, and the only thing keeping me from doom scrolling right now, but some pretty blatant jumps in characters’ personalities from the first book without any real explanation. I’m hoping the third book makes more sense in that regard. She’s great at an ending line though, I’ll give her that.

Very entertaining, especially on audio. I was really disappointed by the ending though - Katarina’s arc seemed like a sudden personality change and completely out of character.

Too absurd/weird for me right now. Might work for me in a different mood, idk.

This book’s main achievement is humanizing smugglers in Latin America. The reader definitely sees beyond the headlines after reading this book. A few irritating points for me, though - he touches on race and gender but not as much I’d like (especially gender), and a lot of the quotes and conversations felt very awkward, like I could tell what the original Spanish probably was and the English translation was stilted. And why were so many presented in Spanglish? Like the author left one or two words in Spanish? Super weird to me. There were also a lot of times the quotes felt way too perfect for the point the author was trying to make.

Overall though a very informative book that Americans especially should read.