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A review by brettpet
Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández
2.0
I picked up Slash and Burn in my library's new arrivals section and the plot description immediately jumped out at me--generational family drama mixed with civil war conflict? My mind immediately jumped to Garcia Marquez's work like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera . Sadly, Burn is nowhere near the caliber of those books due to a baffling author choice: giving none of the characters names. It's quite literally the opposite of Solitude's common complaint of "too many characters". This book has a refined amount of main characters, but no names or defining attributes to differentiate them.
This issue may boil down to translation from the book's original language to English. The afterword points out, "In Spanish, which does not need to repeat pronouns quite as often, the ambiguity stems from a scarcity of designation. In English, the ambiguity stems from abundance...". And god, I wish this afterword had been a prelude instead, because this part really summed up my confusion with the book: "There is the firstborn daughter, who is also the "daughter in that other country", and the "faraway daughter", and the "missing daughter", and "the daughter they [the other daughters] did not grow up with" and..." you get the point. There are four major female characters in this book, the grandmother, mother, and the latter's two daughters (I'm not counting the third daughter as a major character), and you will inevitably reach a point with this book where you read the word "she" twenty times on a single page and your brain will want to shut down.
I'm sure there is a beautiful story within Slash and Burn and some of the humanist themes seeped through the book's obtuse layers, but I can't reccomend the English adaptation at all. I was struggling with the book once the daughter was introduced, praying that names would be added but then confirming my suspicions with the other Goodreads reviews. I did my best with the remaining 250 pages, but you really can't help skimming passages due to redudance and lack of characterization. This could have easily been a DNF for me, but I wanted to power through and even then felt unrewarded.
This issue may boil down to translation from the book's original language to English. The afterword points out, "In Spanish, which does not need to repeat pronouns quite as often, the ambiguity stems from a scarcity of designation. In English, the ambiguity stems from abundance...". And god, I wish this afterword had been a prelude instead, because this part really summed up my confusion with the book: "There is the firstborn daughter, who is also the "daughter in that other country", and the "faraway daughter", and the "missing daughter", and "the daughter they [the other daughters] did not grow up with" and..." you get the point. There are four major female characters in this book, the grandmother, mother, and the latter's two daughters (I'm not counting the third daughter as a major character), and you will inevitably reach a point with this book where you read the word "she" twenty times on a single page and your brain will want to shut down.
I'm sure there is a beautiful story within Slash and Burn and some of the humanist themes seeped through the book's obtuse layers, but I can't reccomend the English adaptation at all. I was struggling with the book once the daughter was introduced, praying that names would be added but then confirming my suspicions with the other Goodreads reviews. I did my best with the remaining 250 pages, but you really can't help skimming passages due to redudance and lack of characterization. This could have easily been a DNF for me, but I wanted to power through and even then felt unrewarded.