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crofteereader 's review for:
Certain Dark Things
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This one didn't have the lyrical prose that I have (perhaps wrongfully) come to expect from Moreno-García after reading Mexican Gothic. It also suffered from keeping the storytelling spread across too many characters: Domingo, Atl, Ana, Nick, and Rodrigo all get turns. Nick in particular infuriated me, and I think we could have gotten a total understanding of his character from Rodrigo's perspective without having to suffer his thoughts and petulance directly. And Ana turned out to be much less interesting than I expected when we first met her.
Domingo and Atl are the real center of the story, showing Domino's naivety and trust and goodness and Atl's trauma and doubt and inner turmoil. It feels like we barely scratched the surface of a much more interesting world (and the Encyclopedia Vampirica at the back of the ARC tells me that there's so much more room to explore).
We do also fall into some tropes that, while they're tropes for a reason, didn't really interest me.
TL;DR I hope this becomes a series or at least a world to revisit, because while this installment isn't great, the world has so much potential.
{Thank you Tor Nightfire for the advanced copy; all thoughts are my own}
Domingo and Atl are the real center of the story, showing Domino's naivety and trust and goodness and Atl's trauma and doubt and inner turmoil. It feels like we barely scratched the surface of a much more interesting world (and the Encyclopedia Vampirica at the back of the ARC tells me that there's so much more room to explore).
We do also fall into some tropes that, while they're tropes for a reason, didn't really interest me.
TL;DR I hope this becomes a series or at least a world to revisit, because while this installment isn't great, the world has so much potential.
{Thank you Tor Nightfire for the advanced copy; all thoughts are my own}