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A review by dude_watchin_with_the_brontes
Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee
3.0
I read this in one day, so I guess that says something pretty good about it. The story was interesting, with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting.
I'm not sure how I feel about the way sexual orientation is dealt with. I feel like a lot of questions are brought up and then never addressed.
The way Peety is written just annoyed me so much, though. He keeps throwing in Spanish words the exact opposite way that anyone unevenly bilingual does, throwing in Spanish cognates for words he was unlikely not to know in English. I have never once in my life said something like "Tengo a problem muy grave, man," so it was hard to believe that Peety would say something like "We have a serious problema, Hombre". (Except he didn't even say "problema," he said "uno problemo," which is two mistakes in one, and I just felt like it would have been really easy to fix. You don't even need a native speaker of Spanish, even the internet could have helped with that.) It was less like a Spanish-dominant English speaker among monolingual English-speakers, and more like my first year students throwing in whatever Spanish they have. (Which is great for them! I love when they Spanish words into their conversation! But it's a completely different linguistic situation and it made no sense with Peety. Which - why was he even named Peety? Could his friends not pronounce "Pedro"? They called him a vaquero, so they should be able to pronounce a super common name.)(End of rant)
I'm not sure how I feel about the way sexual orientation is dealt with. I feel like a lot of questions are brought up and then never addressed.
The way Peety is written just annoyed me so much, though. He keeps throwing in Spanish words the exact opposite way that anyone unevenly bilingual does, throwing in Spanish cognates for words he was unlikely not to know in English. I have never once in my life said something like "Tengo a problem muy grave, man," so it was hard to believe that Peety would say something like "We have a serious problema, Hombre". (Except he didn't even say "problema," he said "uno problemo," which is two mistakes in one, and I just felt like it would have been really easy to fix. You don't even need a native speaker of Spanish, even the internet could have helped with that.) It was less like a Spanish-dominant English speaker among monolingual English-speakers, and more like my first year students throwing in whatever Spanish they have. (Which is great for them! I love when they Spanish words into their conversation! But it's a completely different linguistic situation and it made no sense with Peety. Which - why was he even named Peety? Could his friends not pronounce "Pedro"? They called him a vaquero, so they should be able to pronounce a super common name.)(End of rant)