Sirena Selena: A Novel

I so wanted to like this book.The situations felt intensely real. The places, the language, yes, mostly. The characters, alas, were hollow and lifeless. I'm going to hate myself in the morning for saying this but the parallel is too eerie to ignore: the book I stopped reading to read this one is [b:Feet of Clay 34527 Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3) Terry Pratchett https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320490628s/34527.jpg 3312754], in which golems figure prominently, and I found myself musing that Sir Terry's soulless speechless automatons have more emotional depth, more complex desires and whims and conflicts than are found anywhere in Sirena Selena. This strikes me as unjust because these are stories that need to be heard and which I want to hear.Language note: for complex reasons I read the English translation, not the original. The translation mostly reads well, though some places felt awkward in ways that made sense only if I thought about the phrase in Spanish. Proofreading was poor, and it depresses the hell out of me to realize that I just started writing “...but I‘m getting used to that.” Misspellings (boriqua, siñor); inconsistent spellings, sometimes in places that matter, leading to confusion (“Finn” / “Finín”, a name); even punctuation marks in the middle of a word. Why are publishers so careless these days?