The Bullet Swallower

This marks a strange book for me as I felt the character work was a bit lacking. As a dual-protagonist story, around 80% of the book is spent on one who interacts will a small changing cast, while 20% is spent on the other who has a small fixed cast. My main problem with the character is that outside of the two point of view characters and two side characters, there's not much fleshing out of anyone.

However, despite this I still really enjoyed reading it. The plot is an extremely simple revenge story with some magical realism sprinkled through it. The magical realism is mostly just there to provide a way to neatly deliver the over-arching theme of sins of the ancestor.

The part where this really shined for me was in the writing itself, painting extremely vivid images of scenes with more often than not very little going on. For this to be strong enough to outweigh the weak-to-middling characterisation is unusual for me.

I found this title on a "Best of 2024 (so far) list. I liked the description of a "magical realism western." It takes a while for the fantastical element to fully emerge and I did find the start of the book to be overly violent and pointless. Yet, as the story progessed, the mysterious element blossomed and the pathway to the redemption story emerged. And it's a good one which I found to be worth the wait. The writing was rich, yet not flowery and I appreciated the pace of the tale. I am glad I took this particular journey.

The mythic nature of this story brought me back to my Latin American literature university classes in the best possible way. It is simultaneously rooted in hard realities and mythic celestial decisions. It was a long hard road to get to a place of growth and love, but it made the ending so amazing. I don't read much lit fic, but this one caught my eye and I am so glad I read it!

what a RIDE. equal parts dark, gruesome, thoughtful, and beautiful. absolutely loved this.