A review by abbie_
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza

dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

2.5

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! 

This book is rather confusing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull, always quite interesting but never quite grabbing my attention fully… It’s playful if a book about murdered and castrated men can be said to be playful. After reading Reservoir Bitches earlier in the week, and given the frequency of violence against women depicted in Mexican fiction, it was an interesting twist to have men be the subject of the violence for once.

The main character has the same name as the author, a professor assisting a detective in a serial killer case, where men are targeted and mutilated. Mysterious lines of poetry by an Argentine poet are left at the scene of the crime. About 100 pages in, we get a weird, kinda boring little departure into an academic text about said poet. More meta departures follow, leaving the murder behind to venture into experimental, Inception-esque poetry and prose.

I’m not sure I fully grasped what was being put out there, and that’s on me.