A review by minimicropup
House of Beauty by Melba Escobar

dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

This book sounded like a good plot, but the actual plot didn’t spend much time on the victim, the crime, or finding out who was responsible. It was more about the struggles of female characters experiencing mysogyny, abuse, and poverty. The culture and vibes of the city were well described. Ultimately, I think the writing may have suffered from an overly simplistic translation and lost some nuance and tone in the process. The different narrative voices and points of view change randomly between chapters and in some of them nothing happens at all so it’s confusing AND irritating. It’s difficult to tell whose POV we’re reading from as well since there are no names on the chapters, just numbers. The characters also read very similar to each other for me even when their personalities and situations were described. 

There are inconsistencies in behaviour that took me out of the story too often. For example, a character who is overworked and underpaid but cannot lose her job because she is trying to save money to bring her son to live with her (and is on the verge of homelessness) risks it all to sneak away to a funeral she wasn’t invited to for a young client she briefly met once.