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A review by lucieferg
A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry
3.0
I got this book free from NetGalley in exchange for a review.
"A Fierce and Subtle Poison" opens in modern day Puerto Rico. Lucas is the son of a wealthy American hotel developer and spends his summers partying with his Puerto Rican friends. One day the girl he's been seeing goes up missing, and Lucas is sure the clues to her disappearance lie in the crumbling house at the end of Calle Sol, where local stories say a poisonous girl and her scientist father live.
The unpredictable plot kept me reading - I didn't know what to expect of its twists and turns. It wasn't clear whether the magical/mythical elements (a girl made of poison, cursed parents) would truly be more fantastical or whether they would be explained scientifically in the end. This tension was intriguing and kept the mystery alive, along with some exciting life-or-death moments at the end.
However, this book would have been a lot stronger without the whiny, tortured male protagonist. I didn't like Lucas, nor his attitudes towards others. While the author kept emphasizing his woes and tortured state, he really isn't that pitiable and much of his troubles he did to himself. His character made the book into a classic white-boy-experiences-the-mystical-natives book, which is just bad. If you are going to use a Puerto Rican setting and cultural elements to make a mystery, it would be better to really embed the story in it, instead of making it seem "other".
"A Fierce and Subtle Poison" opens in modern day Puerto Rico. Lucas is the son of a wealthy American hotel developer and spends his summers partying with his Puerto Rican friends. One day the girl he's been seeing goes up missing, and Lucas is sure the clues to her disappearance lie in the crumbling house at the end of Calle Sol, where local stories say a poisonous girl and her scientist father live.
The unpredictable plot kept me reading - I didn't know what to expect of its twists and turns. It wasn't clear whether the magical/mythical elements (a girl made of poison, cursed parents) would truly be more fantastical or whether they would be explained scientifically in the end. This tension was intriguing and kept the mystery alive, along with some exciting life-or-death moments at the end.
However, this book would have been a lot stronger without the whiny, tortured male protagonist. I didn't like Lucas, nor his attitudes towards others. While the author kept emphasizing his woes and tortured state, he really isn't that pitiable and much of his troubles he did to himself. His character made the book into a classic white-boy-experiences-the-mystical-natives book, which is just bad. If you are going to use a Puerto Rican setting and cultural elements to make a mystery, it would be better to really embed the story in it, instead of making it seem "other".