Nope. ( )

It's hard to know how to rate this - vacillating between 3 and 4 stars because so much of it just about horrific stuff It does a really great job of conveying the horrific stuff! But you know. The story is told in third person but through the point of view of Polo, a 16 year old school drop out who's poor, working a shit job in a gated community, and who's full of hate and anger. Mostly misogynist. A lot of the first quarter of the story is just misogyny - the awfulness of the rich when you're poor but told through the incredibly misogynistic and sex obsessed lens of Polo and his not-friend Franco (who is almost always referred to as fatboy), who is himself completely obsessed (in the stereotypical basement dwelling neckbeard way - he even has the Cheeto dust covered hands) with a woman who lives nearby. This is the main driver of the plot.

Lots of time is spent building up the atmosphere and life - Franco using Polo to get alcohol and the two of them getting absolutely wasted every day, the endless insatiable nature of Franco's obsession which builds and builds, the tediousness of Polo's job and shitty living conditions, the desperate hate against everyone and drive to have Something happen while finding no joy anywhere, just the slight numbness of alcohol. Everyone except the rich families of the gated community live lives full of violence and with the constant shadow of the drug cartels (constantly referred to as Them) being both the only route out and a constant threat that can destroy whatever you try and build.

The book is mostly formed of long long run on sentences where there's constant commas where you'd expect full stops - a whole series of impressions and thoughts and images and feelings. It's difficult staying in the mind of a hateful misogynist for so long but it's written so well.

The violence in the book that it builds up to is also handled in a completely anti cathartic way that feels very appropriate and well done. The fantasies give way to violence just being another routine thing, something else to drown out, with no conclusion.

For trigger warning type stuff... There's a lot of violent misogynist thoughts, rape, murder, physical abuse, implied child sexual abuse, incest, torture... It's definitely not a book I'd recommend going into unless you're prepared for a lot ( )

3.5 stars for sure- powerful, heartbreakingly sad, and very well constructed. ( )

I was led to this book by reading the author's "hurricane season," another four-star read.
Teenager in denial about how incredibly he's f***** up his life, has no idea how much more f***** up it's about to get.

Polo is a 16-year-old veracruzano who lives with his mother and cousin. His mother is an assistant accountant for a corporation that owns gated communities. She puts in a good word and forces him to apply for a job as gardener at the nearby luxury housing community. Polo's job is picking up resident's dog turds, cigarette butts near the pool, and trash thrown on The ground by lazy residents, besides watering the lawns and keeping the grounds immaculate.
Señora Maroño is the focus of " Fatboy's" attention (fat boy is the grandson of two elderly residents. He steals money from his grandparents and sends Polo to pick up alcohol and cigarettes, which he shares with him); she is the wife of a rich man who works in entertainment, and they have two little boys. When they throw a party for one of their sons, señora Maroño slips Polo an envelope, "for your trouble,"
".. wherever he turned, there she was, lavishing kisses and hugs on the hordes of little boys and girls running around in swimsuits, and on the women dressed head to toe in tropical prints, as svelte and heavily made up as the hostess herself, their hair straight and inert, as neat and lifeless as wigs, and the husbands just as ridiculous in their pink polos and pastel shirts, ankle grazers and brown loafers, with golf tans and perfectly groomed beards and eyebrows, a clique of pompous voices and clinking ice cubes gathered around that smug short-ass Maroño who spent the entire party taking photos and talking politics and business in the puffed-up lingo of professional cocksuckers to a fawning audience who knocked back glass after glass of imported whiskey, not even pausing to take a look at the hostess' sweet behind, all while their offspring screeched and launched themselves at the juddering bouncy castle walls like raving lunatics and did running cannonballs into the pool, shrieking with suicidal Glee yet barely audible over the music blaring from the mounted poolside speakers."
Ugh.
Spectacles like these scenes he has to tackle at his job are even harder to withstand when he has his daily pounding headache, caused by drinking rotgut every night; all he can afford after his mother takes his pay. He stays out until after his mother and his cousin are asleep, and crawls into the house and lays on the petate mat that is his bed since his mother gave his bed to his cousin.
Cousin is pregnant, and he tries to convince himself that the father is one of the delivery drivers at the nearby convenience store that she likes to flirt with, but he himself has been playing bury the sausage with her. She makes a game out of teasing him when his mother is not around, until he can't stand it anymore.
Polo's grandfather had been his hero. He had looked up to him, and accompanied him everywhere. But his grandfather became demented, and Polo's cousin came, supposedly to help take care of him, but all she did was lay around and watch tv.
".... When he was totally gone in the head and couldn't make it to his workshop and would regularly disappear into a world of his own and shuffle into town where he would wander for hours, his hair stiff and wild and his clothes in tatters, white from all the dust on the roads, barefoot or sometimes wearing just one old huarache, its sole fashioned from a piece of car tire, and Polo wanted to crawl into a hole every time his school friends spotted his grandfather hobble past; they would laugh at the ragged figure he cut and shout things at him while Polo pretended to ignore their insults, until they grew bored of goading The Old Man and left, at which point Polo would go and pick him up off the ground, from under a Shady tree in the square or from the zaguán of some random stranger's house and try to convince him to come, please, abuelo, people are looking at you, it's your grandson, Polo, let's go home, you don't have to sleep on the floor."

Recently the drug traffickers have moved into the area. Polo's cousin Milton had worked as a driver for his father's scrap yard for years, before they kidnapped him one night, forcing him to work for them. They put a pillow case over his head, tied his hands and his feet, and beat him for 3 days, with no food or water. Then they go with him on a trip:
"Milton didn't catch the driver's reply, he simply climbed into the back seat when El Sapo opened the front passenger door, and they drove off. El Sapo rode up front beside the driver, and behind him was El Gritón, with Milton next to him. A few streets further along, El Sapo struck up some small talk with the old-timer driving the taxi, how about this heat, eh?, you see the Tiburón game?, Would you take a look at that ass, and having broached the topic of asses, the taxi driver - a grubby, scruffy old fuck wearing a wife beater vest with his stinking hairy pits on show - perked up and began telling them about all the women he'd f*****, he even gave the three of them tips on how to keep a woman in line, how to mold her to their liking, and El Sapo and El Gritón were laughing their heads off at the bullshit that reeking old fart was spewing, and Milton tried his best to laugh too, to act normal, because even though nobody told him what to do, he figured that that was the attitude he should assume. Anyway, El Sapo didn't stop ribbing the wrinkly prick for the whole journey, until finally they reached the Aurerrá car park and the old man pulled up and told El Sapo, let's call it a round 100, and El Gritón protested from the back, the first time Milton had heard him speak: a hundred pesos my ass, and at that point Milton noticed he had a cable in his hands, a thin steel cable that he lifted over the seat to strangle the taxi driver, but the old man managed to slip his hand between the cable and his neck and that's when El Sapo pulled the emergency brake and held a gun to his head. Easy, easy, take the money, the taxi driver said. You think I give a f*** about your f****** money? El Gritón replied, right in his ear, you're f****** dead, you limp-dick f****** low life. Milton was so confused he didn't notice the reinforcements arrive: two kids who drove up out of nowhere, stopped beside the taxi and started opening the doors. One of them launched on top of the driver, and together with El Sapo, started shouting and laying into him before pulling him out of the taxi and throwing him into the trunk. At the same time, the other guy opened Milton's door, and with no warning at all, shoved him over that so that he could climb in next to him. El Sapo got behind the wheel, fixed the rear view mirror, smoothed his gelled hair and released the handbrake and they flew out of the parking lot without anyone saying a word, as if nothing had happened."

Fatboy hangs out with Polo after hours on the imitation dock by the river, at the edge of the gated community. Fatboy goes on at Great length what he will do to señora Maraño, if he gets a chance, and Polo puts up with his blather for the opportunity to drink his liquor and smoke his cigarettes. Fatboy insinuates himself into the Maroño family, hanging out with the sons, hoping to get a chance to do what he wants.
It's all fun and games until he gets his courage up to do what he has been masturbating to the idea of for all this time.

The ending is abrupt, and the author doesn't tell us what happens to Polo, but rather let's the reader imagine the horror that awaits him. ( )

Melchor attempts to recreate the atmosphere she successfully formed in hurricane season, however this time focusing on two main characters that are explored in detail in order to set up the climax. This book is on another level of dark (that’s saying something considering Melchor‘s previous work) and contains several plot points that are utterly disgusting (which adds to the tone). Although well set up in terms of establishing the two main characters‘ motives and personalities, the climax is very fast (although this could be intentional) and therefore the ending of the story comes fast, too. But still, I reccomend this book to those who are not feint of heart. :) ( )