User Profile

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.

I originally rated this three stars, but this book did something that few books do: it stuck in my head, and I kept thinking about it long after I'd finished it. The premise may seem like cheap sci-fi up front, but it makes you think about life, planned obsolescence, and more.

It’s not the content I don’t like. It’s the writing style. The stream of consciousness devolves into sentences that are paragraphs long, and paragraphs that span multiple pages. Sometimes I just had to skip ahead past the unneeded description and fantasizing until the plot resumed. I still can’t figure out how the book ended, even after re-reading it.

I’d read another of this author’s books, though. I feel like there was some great promise here, but it was poorly executed.