Reviews with content warning for Racism - The Bullet Swallower

Some pretty graphic violence/brief torture that I admittedly had to skim but that might not be too bad for others (I am pretty squeamish about these things). I really loved the story overall & I’m so glad I pushed through those tough bits! I will be thinking about this one for a while.

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autonomous_lass's review

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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tak_everlasting's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

i loved the writing style, even though i found it a bit distant. the plot was interesting and really got me thinking, even though it is (necessarily) gory. the concept of

history being a spiral rather than a straight line always moving toward better and nicer things

is important to consider.

i knocked a star off because i found the characterization of women in this to be very stilted. it's not a first person point of view either, so i found it a bit strange that we are meant to sympathize fully with a man who, by his own repeated admission, drinks, has sex with other people, regularly abandons his wife and family, and refuses to devote himself to the job he has chosen (farming) because he finds it boring.

meanwhile, his wife works the land they have, stays home with his kids, and accepts him whenever he shows up for a few days in between his adventures. see accepts him back every time, after a brief fight over where he's been, because she is a Good Wife who doesn't exist outside of her relevance to her husband. he doesn't even consider the unfairness of this himself

until the end of the book, by which point this is no longer relevant and only contributes to his growth of becoming a better person.

and yes, i understand that this is par for the course in westerns, but that doesn't make it less exhausting. i'm not asking for anything extreme, like her becoming a bandit herself, just that she be allowed to have a breaking point, some limit to her saintly forgiveness.

this pattern of characters that exist to fill a role that they cannot escape from is repeated in other characters, which makes anyone besides the leads rather uncompelling. they must serve the main character, at the expense of their own existence.

which isn't entirely a bad thing, and does in some ways lend to a nuanced reading of the book. it's also tied to the magical realism of it all. but if, like me, you read because you enjoy connecting to the characters, you're pretty much out of luck.

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blair_w's review

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Even though it is a short book it felt dragged out. It just wasn’t holding my attention so I chose to drop it.

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bluz19's review

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adventurous dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Ultimately I see where this book was trying to go. Overall I liked the premise and execution of the book, I just think that it wasn’t quite for me. You follow two timelines, 1895 and 1964. In 1895, a man that is constantly down on his luck, decides to rob a train with his brother which goes terribly wrong. The Texas Rangers are chasing them all around Texas as the main character is trying to get revenge on his brother being killed. Along the way he meets many people as well as faces death multiple times.

It was interesting to see the storyline play out. I like to watch westerns with my dad, which seeing the legend of The Bullet Swallower from start to finish was intriguing. However the side plot that exists in the story seem to just cloud the story. They didn’t hold my attention until the end when the current ancestor was piecing it all together. I don’t think that the magical realism was filled as far for what it could have been. I liked the inclusion of the personification of death and I think it added a layer to the story, it just was a subpar side plot. The main story was pretty interesting. I won’t say that any of it really shocked me though. It held my attention because it is full of action, grief played a big part, and it was about deciding who you want to be. I think it could’ve told more of the background of the family and filled that rather than having a focus of the current timeline in 1964. Overall this was a good quick read and I enjoyed it as a break from high fantasy.

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gabi_tron's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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yourbookishbff's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I loved this. A blend of magical realism and cowboy Western, but recast to actually examine and expose the glorification of violence (and particularly colonial violence) in the genre. James explores the legacies of violence among colonizing people, and through an Old-Testament-retribution storyline, questions if redemption is possible and what responsibility future generations have. I loved how easily the story moved between our two historical timelines (the late 1800s and the mid 1960s) and how our grim reaper shadows the story literally and metaphorically. I loved the use of an actual narrating storyteller within the 1960s timeline, as it creates a fascinating contrast between the actual depiction of history and the main character's attempt to romanticize it for his own absolution. At times, it felt like James was speaking to us directly through this storyteller, as the 1800s storyline is largely inspired by her own ancestor, and you can see how she is using this narrative to question her own inheritance.

This is routinely billed as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, and my one quibble with this is that the author's perspective is so radically different than these authors, and the characterization of the leading men in this story underscore her efforts to avoid romanticization or glorification of patriarchal traditions and colonial violence. These men are pathetic, greedy, indecisive, immature, and, eventually (finally) reflective and seeking. It's not just a story of fate, adventure and family curses, it's a dismantling of the cowboy.

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crows_in_a_trenchcoat's review

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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