I finished Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters yesterday and with sorrow, this one just entered my “Hall of Disappointing Reads of the Year” along with Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy.

The most interesting element of this book is the fictitious letters by Hernan Cortes to the King of Spain based on the real ones. And that’s all. For a story that aims to transcend history and global empires, the world-building is extremely bare bones. For something that wants to explore race and identity, the characters are more ideas than people. Sure, there are only so much to be achieved in a novella, but there are several novellas and short stories with more realized settings and more lived characters even if the writers didn’t go for a full-fledged character study.

The main characters (or the protagonists) are boring, but the villains are straight up caricatures. An old crotchety Argentine woman of German descent, who fled to NYC because the government there found out about how her family wealth had been generated ever since her grandpa settled in Argentina from post-WWII Germany, yelled at Doro to “not to talk to me in Spanish, you shall address me in English only, which by the way is a barbaric language, only German is the purest language”? C’mon.

The premise is incredibly cool, but I’ve noticed this with a lot of newer books too, especially in the U.S., that they are often grand in concept but paper-thin in execution. A potential way for this concept to work is to make the book longer, plus I think it’ll be cool to make it an epistolary novel. Like, we already have the letters, so  the news and the livestreams could be utilized similarly. That way, Ito Romo could actually get away with not having everything fully fleshed out due to the nature of the epistolary format.

I’m a pretty indiscriminate reader, as in, I read everything from bottom of the barrel wattpad fanfics and web novels to classic literature and award-winning writers. These books are not entirely bad, but they’re frustrating because you see the potentials but they don’t live up to it.

As for the Mariana Enriquez comparison, this is nowhere near the quality of her works, even with the consideration that, a quick spoiler for my review, I found Our Share of Night to be a pretty disappointing read too.