A review by tessa_talks_books
The Manchineel by Jessica Carrasquillo

 

One-word review: Surprising

Emojis: 🤔🫣🫢

My thoughts:

Ana and Ben are married, but it's easy to tell something is amiss. When Elyse walks into Ben's world, things that once had been brushed under the rug begin to see the light of day, and the need to get Ben out of his marriage becomes all-consuming. Elyse looks to her plant knowledge for answers and finds surprising and horrific ones.

The Manchineel by Jessica Cassaquillo is the most surprising book I've read in a while. The role twist of the abusive wife rather than the more typical abusive husband was interesting. I don't know that I always believed that's how an abusive wife would act, but it could be, and it's still interesting to consider.

I also enjoy a morally gray character, and this book is chocked full of characters that rest somewhere between morally gray and flat-out evil. Where they fall along that line depends on the reader's perspective, which means everyone interprets this story differently. This is a very cool aspect of the story.

Lastly, the plant metaphors add an extra layer to the tale - one that is illuminating and disturbing and acts as almost a  foil for each of the main characters' decisions. I loved how that played through in one form or another throughout the story. The ending was both predictable and surprising and left me with an unbalanced feeling of a story that still needs to be finished. But that's my interpretation based on where I thought the characters fell between morally gray and evil. Yours could be totally different.😉