Mexican Gothic

Difficult start. Difficult everything, actually: horrible nasty characters, the kind you just wish would throw themselves repeatedly off a tall parapet onto jagged rocks. Even the heroine—a vain, shallow teenager—was uninteresting, so I had noone to care about. (She does grow up some, but even in the end she remains forgettable.) The beautyist undertones irked me: ugly nerd vs handsome bad-boy is such a tired trope. The story itself is melodramatic almost to the point of being campy, but I can see it being fun in a bubblegum-pageturny way. And perhaps cranky old males aren't the book's target audience anyway, so I'll shut up now.