Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez

Furia
by Yamile Saied Méndez
narrated by Sol Madariaga

Published: 2020
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
Hardback: 368
Rating: 5
YA, Sports, Soccer, South America, Argentina | Goodreads | Website

First sentence(s):
Lies have short legs.

In Rosario, Argentina, Camila Hassan lives a double life.

At home, she is a careful daughter, living within her mother’s narrow expectations, in her rising-soccer-star brother’s shadow, and under the abusive rule of her short-tempered father.

On the field, she is La Furia, a powerhouse of skill and talent. When her team qualifies for the South American tournament, Camila gets the chance to see just how far those talents can take her. In her wildest dreams, she’d get an athletic scholarship to a North American university.

But the path ahead isn’t easy. Her parents don’t know about her passion. They wouldn’t allow a girl to play fútbol—and she needs their permission to go any farther. And the boy she once loved is back in town. Since he left, Diego has become an international star, playing in Italy for the renowned team Juventus. Camila doesn’t have time to be distracted by her feelings for him. Things aren’t the same as when he left: she has her own passions and ambitions now, and La Furia cannot be denied. As her life becomes more complicated, Camila is forced to face her secrets and make her way in a world with no place for the dreams and ambition of a girl like her.

Filled with authentic details and the textures of day-to-day life in Argentina, heart-soaring romance, and breathless action on the pitch, Furia is the story of a girl’s journey to make her life her own.

My two-bits:

Empowering. Loved the passion this protagonist has to motivate towards her dreams and desires. Wonderful "Go Girl!" story.

~*~
* Listened to audiobook version.
* part of Armchair Autumn Travel (here)
* part of Reese's Book Club 2020 (here)

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
narrated by Frankie Corzo

Published: 2020
Publisher: Del Rey
Hardback: 301
Rating: 4
Historical, Horror, Mexico | Goodreads | Website
Travel destination: Mexico

First sentence(s):
The parties at the Tuñóns' house always ended unquestionably late, and since the hosts enjoyed costume parties in particular, it was not unusual to see Chinas Poblanos with their folkloric skirts and ribbons in their hair arrive in the company of a harlequin or a cowboy.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find - her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

My two-bits:

Slow burn surreal horror with that gothic vibe as the title suggests. Haunted house doings. Perfectly haunting for the season.

~*~

* Listened to audiobook version.

* part of Armchair Autumn Travel (here)

Dinner by César Aira

Dinner
by César Aira
translated by Katherine Silver

Published: 2006
Publisher: New Directions Paperback
Genre: Novella, Magical Realism, Zombies, Argentina, Coronel Pringles
Paperback: 101
Rating: 4
Goodreads

First sentence(s):
My friend was home alone, but he invited us over for dinner anyway; he was a very sociable man--liked to talk and tell stories, though he wasn't any good at it; he'd get the episodes mixed up, leave effects without effects, skip over important parts, and drop anecdotes right in the middle.

Was it a nightmare―the result of a bad case of indigestion―or did something truly scary happen after dinner in the Argentine town of Coronel Pringles?

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living―all somehow, disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party.

My two-bits:
This quick gory zombie feast read got me thinking of the realities of living.

And, what of relationships with people?

~*~
* weekly theme: ¡VIVA! Annual Celebration of Latino Hispanic Heritage

Tomb Song by Julián Herbert

Tomb Song
by Julián Herbert
translated by Christian MacSweeney

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt
Twitter

Just released: March 6, 2018
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Genre: Literary, Autofiction
Paperback: 208
Rating: 4

First sentence(s):
As a child, I wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. A man in a white coat.

Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, the narrator of Tomb Song is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. His mother, Guadalupe, was a prostitute, and Julián spent his childhood with his half brothers and sisters, each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next.

Swinging from the present to the past and back again, Tomb Song is not only an affecting coming-of-age story but also a searching and sometimes frenetic portrait of the artist. As he wanders the hospital, from its buzzing upper floors to the haunted depths of the morgue, Julián tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba. Throughout, he portrays the margins of Mexican society as well as the attitudes, prejudices, contradictions, and occasionally absurd history of a country ravaged by corruption, violence, and dysfunction.

Inhabiting the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay, Tomb Song is an electric prose performance, a kaleidoscopic, tender, and often darkly funny exploration of sex, love, and death. Julián Herbert’s English-language debut establishes him as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary letters.

My two-bits:

Found some beautiful passages of observations of this author's past. I was more taken with the childhood memories.

~*~
* part of Rooster Summer Reading Challenge 2018 (here)

Hotel Brasil: The Mystery of the Severed Heads by Frei Betto

Hotel Brasil:
The Mystery of the Severed Heads
by Frei Betto
translated by Jethro Soutar

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads

Published: 2014 reprint
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Genre: Mystery, Brazil
Paperback: 288
Rating: 4

First sentence(s):
He'd seen it out of the corner of his eye, without meaning to see it.

The setting for this witty and insightful debut crime novel is a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, family hotel. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its history of military dictatorship, drug wars, child gangs, and violent policing tactics.

The decapitated body of a hotel resident is found. The eyes have been removed from the head, casually left on the floor of the room. The victim's eerie, frozen Mona Lisa smile seems to indicate that the murderer had been received as a friend.

According to the police, the victim was stabbed in the heart and died before the decapitation. As the investigation continues, with few leads or clues worth pursuing, other hotel clients are found dead; all decapitated, usually with the head found delicately balanced on their knees.

This classical crime novel provides an opportunity for Frei Betto (a Dominican friar, once a political prisoner, a union activist, and then an adviser to President Lula da Silva) to describe Brazilian society, especially those left at its edge, like Rio's favela children, abused, hunted-down, but also addicted to drugs and violent crime.

The book tells the fascinating back stories of the hotel residents, suspects, and eventual victims, such as the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, and the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, while being faithful to a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell.

My two-bits:

This mystery of severed heads is told with multi perspectives. The focus on the residents of the hotel gave a sense of the different strata of people (culture and class system) in this world. In fact, the stories of each individual became more interesting than solving the mystery.

~*~
* part of Books, Inc. Foreign Intrigue Book Club (here)

Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo

Needle in a Haystack
by Ernesto Mallo
translated by Jethro Soutar

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt

Published: 2010
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Genre: Mystery, Crime, Buenos Aires
Paperback: 190
Rating: 4

Inspector Lascano Mystery series:
Needle in a Haystack
Sweet Money
book 3 - tba, not yet translated

First sentence(s):
Some days the side of the bed is like the edge of an enormous abyss.

Superintendent Lascano is a detective working under the shadow of military rule in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s. Sent to investigate a double murder, he arrives at the crime scene to find three bodies. Two are clearly the work of the Junta's death squads, murders he is forced to ignore; the other one seems different.

The trail leads Lascano through a decadent Argentina, a country poisoned to its core by the tyranny of the regime. The third corpse turns out to be that of Biterman, moneylender and Auschwitz survivor. When Lascano digs too deep, he must confront Giribaldi, an army major, quick to help old friends but ruthless in dealing with dissenters such as Eva, the young militant with whom Lascano is falling in love.

My two-bits:

Interesting storytelling format with reveals that occur before the end. It started to feel mystery-ish to me midway in the book.

Lots of good character development of several different characters that paint a picture of the place and time period.

~*~
* part of Books, Inc. Foreign Intrigue Book Club (here)

Death Going Down by Maria Angelica Bosco

Death Going Down
by Maria Angelica Bosco
translated by Lucy Greaves

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads

Published: 2017
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Argentina
Paperback: 160
Rating: 4

First sentence(s):
The car pulled up in front of an apartment building on one side of the first blocks of Calle Santa Fe, where the street opens out to the view across the wide Plaza San Martin

In the early hours of the morning, a woman is found in the elevator of a plush apartment block on Santa Fe Road, Buenos Aires. She's young, gorgeous and dead. With this opening image starts one of the greatest crime novels ever written in Argentina. A woman has been murdered and it is immediately apparent that all the suspects have secrets to hide.

Death Going Down contains all the ingredients of a classic detective novel, and is set during the aftermath of World War II, when many immigrants were making their way to Argentina, some of them with dark pasts in Europe to hide...

My two-bits:

The past catches up with the present and causes this quick mystery read. It is told with different detecting perspectives. So, did not connect with the main detective.

~*~
* part of Books, Inc. Foreign Intrigue Book Club (here)

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

The Sound of Things Falling
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt

Published: 2013
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Genre: Literary, Historical, South America
Hardback: 288 pages
Rating: 5

First sentence(s):
The first hippopotamus, a male the color of black pearls, weighing a ton and a half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009.

From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force – an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.

In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.

Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

My two-bits:

This drug war story was not riddled with violence as seen in many shows these days. It is a post-modern piece told in a hazy, mysterious way with dreams, metaphors, memories and reflections.

Some moving passages got me writing down quotes.

Got me thinking of hippos, billiards and planes.

~*~
* National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

* part of Book Passage Literary Prize Book Group (here)

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, Christina MacSweeney

The Story of My Teeth
by Valeria Luiselli, Christina MacSweeney

Original Title: Historia de mis dientes

Find out more about this book and author:
Powells
Goodreads

Published: 2015
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Genre: Literary, South America
Paperback: 184 pages
Rating: 4

First sentence(s):
I'm the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I'm a discreet sort of man.

I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.

Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf.

Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.

My two-bits:

The first half of this story is told from one point of view and then another point of view in the second half that makes an interesting twist.

Lots of info on teeth and owners of teeth. Interesting how teeth could be made sooo interesting and made into an engaging topic.

~*~

Tournament of Books short list nominee (details)

Amazon Burning by Victoria Griffith

Amazon Burning
by Victoria Griffith

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
Website

Just released: November 7, 2014
Publisher: Astor + Blue Editions
Genre: Mystery, New Adult, Thriller
Paperback: 220 pages
Rating: 4.5

When 22-year-old aspiring journalist Emma Cohen is forced to flee the comforts of her NYU student life, she maneuvers an internship from her father at his newspaper in Rio de Janeiro. There, Emma is immediately swept into a major news story—and a life-threatening situation—when a famous jungle environmentalist, Milton Silva, is mysteriously murdered.

Emma must now enter the Amazon rainforest with her father to investigate, where she is both awed by the enormity and beauty of the Amazon and appalled by its reckless destruction. Not only will Emma have to brave the primal world of the Amazon, she must fight to survive the kidnappers, villains, corrupt activists, and indigenous tribes that lay in wait along the ever-twisting trail of the murder case. Stretched to the brink, it’s up to Emma, her father, and the dreamy news photographer, Jimmy, to unravel the mystery and live to tell the tale.

Amazon Burning by Victoria Griffith is a spectacular debut Young Adult novel. Griffith's powerful rendering of the Amazon rainforest forms the perfect, wildly exotic backdrop for this extraordinary tale of a young urban woman coming of age in the midst of intense conflict.

My two-bits:

Got introduced to the Amazon with this mystery thriller.

From the city locals to the indigenous people of the Amazon described, you can get a sense of the culture and lifestyle. Although, this story leans towards the darker and sad side of things.

The main character, Emma, starts out as a strong and spunky character and continues to grow into a stronger and mature young woman due to life threatening experiences and exposure to the ugly side of life in this story.

~*~
* review copy courtesy of publisher

* feel free to let me know if this is a book you would be interested in reading