Take a photo of a barcode or cover
tuai 's review for:
Futbolista
by Jonny Garza Villa
3,5/5. Rounded down because it's crazy how overrated this book is on GR right now.
It's a fine story, not badly written, but I have a few gripes with it that I will now list in no particular order.
1. This novel has no business being 400 pages long. For the last 15% I was skimming most of the internal monologue. It got REPETITIVE!
2. There's a lot of Spanish interspersed through the text, and as a native Spanish speaker it hurt my soul every time the grammar got botched. Like, Gabi calls himself "Tu futbolista favorita." Futbolista is relating here to a male football player, and that makes it a male noun, so it should get a male adjective! That's Spanish 101, how did no one catch this. It happens often enough that it makes me wonder if the author actually speaks the language. Like, don't write a novel in a language you aren't proficient in.
3. The football talk. As an, also, native football enjoyer, what the fuck. One of the first matches we get to read about ends up with a penalty shootout, but there's a wall? Like, players standing in between the kicker and the goalie, so... It is a free kick? I guess?? That's also football 101, I can't get my head around it. Some things maybe got lost in translation for me, because 99% of the football content I consume in Spanish and in Europe, but there's no way they refer to goals as 'points' in America, right? It also read as if the author doesn't really know/like football.
4. All the talk about blowing people's backs. You can just say sex, you know? It's allowed. It's encouraged, even.
It's a fine story, not badly written, but I have a few gripes with it that I will now list in no particular order.
1. This novel has no business being 400 pages long. For the last 15% I was skimming most of the internal monologue. It got REPETITIVE!
2. There's a lot of Spanish interspersed through the text, and as a native Spanish speaker it hurt my soul every time the grammar got botched. Like, Gabi calls himself "Tu futbolista favorita." Futbolista is relating here to a male football player, and that makes it a male noun, so it should get a male adjective! That's Spanish 101, how did no one catch this. It happens often enough that it makes me wonder if the author actually speaks the language. Like, don't write a novel in a language you aren't proficient in.
3. The football talk. As an, also, native football enjoyer, what the fuck. One of the first matches we get to read about ends up with a penalty shootout, but there's a wall? Like, players standing in between the kicker and the goalie, so... It is a free kick? I guess?? That's also football 101, I can't get my head around it. Some things maybe got lost in translation for me, because 99% of the football content I consume in Spanish and in Europe, but there's no way they refer to goals as 'points' in America, right? It also read as if the author doesn't really know/like football.
4. All the talk about blowing people's backs. You can just say sex, you know? It's allowed. It's encouraged, even.