The Bullet Swallower

This marks a strange book for me as I felt the character work was a bit lacking. As a dual-protagonist story, around 80% of the book is spent on one who interacts will a small changing cast, while 20% is spent on the other who has a small fixed cast. My main problem with the character is that outside of the two point of view characters and two side characters, there's not much fleshing out of anyone.

However, despite this I still really enjoyed reading it. The plot is an extremely simple revenge story with some magical realism sprinkled through it. The magical realism is mostly just there to provide a way to neatly deliver the over-arching theme of sins of the ancestor.

The part where this really shined for me was in the writing itself, painting extremely vivid images of scenes with more often than not very little going on. For this to be strong enough to outweigh the weak-to-middling characterisation is unusual for me.