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Dystopian survival horror isn’t my thing. I had to read this for book club. It started off like a small chore, but one I was into it, I could barely put it down. When the main conflict seemed to reach its denouement with many pages to go, I knew that I was being led on, and I waited for the satisfying twist that, thankfully, was delivered.

Sorry for being vague, but I don’t want to go too deeply into this for risk of spoilers. The book left me with questions I really wanted answered, but only for my own understanding; perhaps the horror wouldn’t have been so compelling were all my questions to be answered. (UPDATE: there’s a sequel! All right!)

I’ll raise a pint to you, A. M. Shine.

Wow, I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did.

Hilarious, if you like baseball.

It’s not really my genre, but I picked this up for book club, and I quite enjoyed the ride. “Mister Magic” plays well on tropes about childhood nostalgia, and having a main character as a bit of a tabula rasa helps. The plot moves at a decent pace, and I loved that the ending doesn’t suck; in fact, it was all but perfect given the plot.

The ending wasn’t very satisfying, but it really worked well for the plot.

The more you read, the less you care about any of the characters. Perhaps that was just me becoming more rational toward this irrational garbage.

The first chapter or so had me remembering summers at my grandparents’ house. That feeling is quickly ripped away in favor of whatever the hell else this book wanted to be.

All in all, I quite enjoyed this. While I'm no expert on Mexican culture, it did provide a breath of fresh air in a typically whitewashed genre. It wasn't necessarily the greatest story ever told, but when it was all over, I enjoyed my time spent reading this.

It's a slow starter, like many books, but now it's getting really good, really quickly.