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A review by forgottenangstycharacter
Nothing Can Hurt You Now by Simone Campos
2.0
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Nothing Can Hurt You Now is a propulsive thriller that forces readers to ask the question: how well do you know your family? This short, translated book begins with Lucinda learning her younger sister, Vivianna, is missing. Lucinda jumps into action. When the police refuse to help, she goes across Brazil to find out the truth about her sister’s disappearance. Along the way, she discovers that her sister has moved from modelling to sex work and has a life that Lucinda is completely unaware of. Lucinda must team up with Graziane, Viviana’s girlfriend to find Viviana before it is too late.
First off there were some cool noir aesthetics in this book, and I’m a sucker for a bit of noir. The amateur detective putting themselves in danger and infiltrating a lawless world, which was captured quite nicely. It was also cool to see queer women inhabiting the noir space as both Viviana and Lucinda are bisexual. While some of the messaging about objectification and feminism was heavy-handed and reductive, there were some great bits around the colourism and racism that both sisters faced when trying to make it in the world. They are two women shaped by a childhood of pretending to fit in.
“The game being played by both sisters was that of appearing normal — in other words, white — just like everyone else at their school.”
These moments did serve to show how both women have taken different trajectories in their lives based on social barriers that keep them constrained and work against them when one of them goes missing.
This story had two major plot lines running through it: Lucinda and Graziane attempting to track down Viviana, and Viviana trying to understand the new situation she has found herself in after being abducted. These two storylines appeared disjointed and seemed to exist because the story had written itself into a corner with Lucinda’s investigation and had to switch to Viviana’s perspective to keep the story going.
The perspectives themselves occasionally got in the way of the story itself. Lucinda narrates what she is doing moment by moment, often passing judgment on her sister before backpedalling to absolve her sister in her mind. She comes across as dismissive of Vivianna’s struggles as a neurodivergent person and sex worker. She refers to her sister’s style as potentially “a chaotic attempt at self-expression by someone who had, let’s not forget, been diagnosed as autistic”.
Lucinda seems to view her sister as some form of warning of what her life could have been like. “If I hadn’t toed the line, it would have been me”. These moments are indicative of the universalist feminist claims that run through this book, often lacking nuance, which is unfortunate in a book that could have said some really important things surrounding the objectification of women. Lucinda’s views are never challenged and are passed off as the thoughts of a protective and scared older sister.
Within Lucinda’s narration there is plenty of cutting in and out of flashbacks and jumping into other’s heads for their thoughts before jumping back to Lucinda. These flashbacks are only signalled by the shift from past to present tense and vice versa. They serve to dump the information on you rather than explain or integrate pertinent details.
Viviana on the other hand becomes a manic pixie dream girl version of the sex work industry. She’s (potentially) autistic but refutes the diagnosis — which is fair enough but the way it's done seems to be done in the “I’m not autistic I’m just quirky”. She’s aloof, she's well-read, she’s unconventional, she’s well travelled, she’s hot. As a reader, we are forced into Viviana’s head and are only given her assertions when it comes to what’s happening around her. She mentions that she “could detect some bisexual signals coming from” a character but as the reader this is never shown to the reader, we just have to trust her assertion. She decides that she “wasn’t all that special in this whole mess” of her kidnapping using some Freudian psychoanalysis to explain things. This is never proven again we have to take her word for it.
This book has a lot of potential as a thriller, however, I struggled with the writing.
TikTok: @forgottenangstycharacter | Goodreads: Georgina (forgottenangstycharacter)
Nothing Can Hurt You Now is a propulsive thriller that forces readers to ask the question: how well do you know your family? This short, translated book begins with Lucinda learning her younger sister, Vivianna, is missing. Lucinda jumps into action. When the police refuse to help, she goes across Brazil to find out the truth about her sister’s disappearance. Along the way, she discovers that her sister has moved from modelling to sex work and has a life that Lucinda is completely unaware of. Lucinda must team up with Graziane, Viviana’s girlfriend to find Viviana before it is too late.
First off there were some cool noir aesthetics in this book, and I’m a sucker for a bit of noir. The amateur detective putting themselves in danger and infiltrating a lawless world, which was captured quite nicely. It was also cool to see queer women inhabiting the noir space as both Viviana and Lucinda are bisexual. While some of the messaging about objectification and feminism was heavy-handed and reductive, there were some great bits around the colourism and racism that both sisters faced when trying to make it in the world. They are two women shaped by a childhood of pretending to fit in.
“The game being played by both sisters was that of appearing normal — in other words, white — just like everyone else at their school.”
These moments did serve to show how both women have taken different trajectories in their lives based on social barriers that keep them constrained and work against them when one of them goes missing.
This story had two major plot lines running through it: Lucinda and Graziane attempting to track down Viviana, and Viviana trying to understand the new situation she has found herself in after being abducted. These two storylines appeared disjointed and seemed to exist because the story had written itself into a corner with Lucinda’s investigation and had to switch to Viviana’s perspective to keep the story going.
The perspectives themselves occasionally got in the way of the story itself. Lucinda narrates what she is doing moment by moment, often passing judgment on her sister before backpedalling to absolve her sister in her mind. She comes across as dismissive of Vivianna’s struggles as a neurodivergent person and sex worker. She refers to her sister’s style as potentially “a chaotic attempt at self-expression by someone who had, let’s not forget, been diagnosed as autistic”.
Lucinda seems to view her sister as some form of warning of what her life could have been like. “If I hadn’t toed the line, it would have been me”. These moments are indicative of the universalist feminist claims that run through this book, often lacking nuance, which is unfortunate in a book that could have said some really important things surrounding the objectification of women. Lucinda’s views are never challenged and are passed off as the thoughts of a protective and scared older sister.
Within Lucinda’s narration there is plenty of cutting in and out of flashbacks and jumping into other’s heads for their thoughts before jumping back to Lucinda. These flashbacks are only signalled by the shift from past to present tense and vice versa. They serve to dump the information on you rather than explain or integrate pertinent details.
Viviana on the other hand becomes a manic pixie dream girl version of the sex work industry. She’s (potentially) autistic but refutes the diagnosis — which is fair enough but the way it's done seems to be done in the “I’m not autistic I’m just quirky”. She’s aloof, she's well-read, she’s unconventional, she’s well travelled, she’s hot. As a reader, we are forced into Viviana’s head and are only given her assertions when it comes to what’s happening around her. She mentions that she “could detect some bisexual signals coming from” a character but as the reader this is never shown to the reader, we just have to trust her assertion. She decides that she “wasn’t all that special in this whole mess” of her kidnapping using some Freudian psychoanalysis to explain things. This is never proven again we have to take her word for it.
This book has a lot of potential as a thriller, however, I struggled with the writing.
TikTok: @forgottenangstycharacter | Goodreads: Georgina (forgottenangstycharacter)