shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

this felt like three different stories stacked in a trench coat trying to be one
HOWEVER the ending was great yes it did make me cry a little bit

 this cover is gorgeous, im a massive sucker for flowers and a face together on book covers and this does that impeccably
i do not have the energy for a full review but just know the story does not live up to the cover

i think the translation just is not working for me, its that type of writing style where my brain is just glazing over any time i try and read it even though realistically i love the premise

incredibly fucking weird and thats what makes it so GOOD

I LOVE WEIRD TRANS ART !!!!
Silver Sprocket published this AND the chromatic fantasy???? two of my favorite books of 2024 and just ever??? time to read every other thing theyve published

i’ll definitely come back to this eventually, but it’s just not holding my interest rn

for my own sake, im not doing a full review of this book. i grew up AFAB in an extremely right-wing christian family, and those are experiences i very much dont want to relive while writing a review.
don’t take that to mean i dont like this book, genuinely i think it’s incredible and it hit very hard. i have family who was into the gothard shit, i grew up around some of the beliefs Tia discusses being prevalent. i’m incredibly grateful that she wrote this.
i could go into more detail, but a lot of it are things i dont want to ruminate on, so i’ll leave you with this: the day all the right-wing ideals and conservative idealogy began to crack for me was when i was about 11. my parents let me have a national geographic subscription (i was extremely into science), and in one of the issues was a picture of people celebrating in washington DC the day queer marriage was legalized in america. i pulled the magazine out when i was alone one day and stared at the picture, and just thought “they don’t look evil. they look happy.”

this book is hard to read and has a vast amount of triggering topics, so read at your own discretion. i’ve tried to include the major ones below, but there are almost definitely more.

:/
i didn’t like this and that makes me very sad
the age group this is aimed at feels incredibly vague, how characters talk feels very juvenile but the book deals with some really serious topics 
it really doesn’t help that Kai goes from age 10 to 19(?), which with the length leads to some wild time jumps :(
the dialogue feels very very stilted, and has difficulty with stating things that the reader can gather based on the art (for example, at one point Kai has a scared look on her face and the words say “I am so afraid!”)
:( really thought i’d like this
also nearly forgot but the relationship genuinely comes out of NOWHERE they kiss in a dream after meeting each other when theyre both people only once

positive this book has an audience out there for it, but i personally was extremely bored

even as someone who doesn’t know much about soccer, this was really cool (its also about more than just soccer!!!)
i feel extremely unqualified to talk about a lot of the aspects of this book, as its main topic is sexism in South America, specifically Argentina (it’s also very feminist :D). as im,,, not a woman (im transmasculine, so feminism and sexism affect me too just in different ways than they affect women obviously) and not south american, i really have no place to speak on some topics in this. HOWEVER, i can say it’s a super compelling story !! Camila “La Furia” Hassan was a great main character, she feels extremely real. i do wish this had focused just slightly more on her relationships with some of the other girls in this book (mainly Roxana and Karen), i would’ve loved to see more depth there. even so this was a really good and important book