This novel by a Costa Rican writer is so bad that I actually finished it just to make sure the author is really that inept. I kept waiting for a punchline of some sorts because it’s hard to imagine anybody writing such a crappy novel in all seriousness.

Between endless discussions of how white women stink while black women smell nice, extremely repetitive and probably copy-pasted descriptions of the female protagonist’s breasts, pages and pages of atrocity porn mixed up with the cheesiest sex scenes in existence, serious explanations of how MS-13 members are violent because they don’t get love from the government, lamentations of the horrible tragedy that was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and an inane celebration of 9/11, it’s truly one of the most idiotic books I ever read.

But all of this isn’t even the worst part. Rossi doesn’t know how to write novels. The mechanics of writing is all wrong. The plot is ridiculous, the shifts in perspective are clumsy, the characters are cartoonish, and every third sentence is a slogan of the tritest imaginable kind.

The promotional blurb describes the author as “a writer, translator, journalist, environmentalist, and a specialist in development and women’s studies.” I wonder if she sucks as badly at all of these professions.