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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I absolutely loved this book!!! It was a bit hard for me to get into at first just because this is not my normal genre but I absolutely LOVED it and the farther in I got it was like I couldn’t read fast enough to see what was next! Highly recommend!
I love reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories but at first I struggled to find a way into Velvet Was the Night. Then I checked out the audiobook and the narrator, Gisela Chípe, brought the book to life in a way that my own brain had not been able to. The plot was methodical and maybe inevitable, the characters haunted and perhaps doomed, the setting a harsh and politically repressed 1971 Mexico City. I came to appreciate and root for the two focal characters even if I didn’t ever end up liking them.
Probably my least favourite of Moreno-Garcia. Super slow through the middle that I almost gave up. Unlikeable protagonist. Elvis was an alright character. I like that it’s based on a real time and place in history so I have a window to what it was like then, but otherwise I’d pass on this book.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’ve become a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, but this one is a miss. It felt like such a long book but it’s not at all. I couldn’t connect with the characters at all. I’m sad because this had promise.
a mexican noir. political upheaval & fantasizing working girl caught in the middle.
The pacing of the book was so slow and off. It only picked up in maybe the last 1/5 of the book so for the most part I was completely bored. This book is noir, pulp fiction (which I only realized in the end) so I guess it makes sense for why the story was set up the way it was and why I gave it three stars instead of two (because now it makes sense why the author may have chosen to write this story in this way) Anyways this story is based on real politics that happened in Mexico, but I don’t have any previous knowledge of that time period (so I think you could probably appreciate this book more if you had a base knowledge of it). I did like learning more about the politics of the time period and the setting of the book (which is super important in a noir I believe) but other than that everything else was not great. The story telling still fell really flat, the plot was so slow moving until the end and most of the characters irritated me. Anyways, I thought I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone but if you do enjoy the noir genre then you would probably enjoy this