DNF Early Review – Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 304 pages
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: August 17, 2021
ASIN : B08NTCZ2ND
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from NetGalley
Rating: 2/5 stars
“1970s, Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger.
Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, seems to live a life of intrigue and romance that Maite envies. When Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.
Meanwhile, someone else is also looking for Leonora at the behest of his boss, a shadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists. Elvis is an eccentric criminal who longs to escape his own life: He loathes violence and loves old movies and rock ’n’ roll. But as Elvis searches for the missing woman, he watches Maite from a distance—and comes to regard her as a kindred spirit who shares his love of music and the unspoken loneliness of his heart.
Now as Maite and Elvis come closer to discovering the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, they can no longer escape the danger that threatens to consume their lives, with hitmen, government agents, and Russian spies all aiming to protect Leonora’s secrets—at gunpoint.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this book from NetGalley to review.
Thoughts: This book follows two characters. The first is Maite who is a secretary with a somewhat lonely miserable life who absolutely lives for her romantic comics. The second is Elvis, he is an enforcer for a local government supported gang. The two end up interacting over the disappearance of one of Maite’s neighbors, Leonora.
I stopped reading this about 40% of the way through. The story just did not hold my interest at all. Both the character POVs we are reading from are fairly boring and hard to engage in. The story takes place in Mexico City in the 1970’s during the Dirty War, which I thought would be intriguing. However, at 40% I still wasn’t sure what the point was. Up to the 40% mark it was a very “day in the life of” type of story with very little plot.
The cover is beautiful but that’s all this really has going for it (at least as far as I read in). I have a lot of review books lined up to read and just don’t have the patience for something that moves so slow and seems so wandering and pointless.
I enjoyed “Mexican Gothic” and also have “Gods of Jade and Shadow” on my shelf to read. This book is quite a bit different in subject, genre, and pacing and I didn’t find it was different in a good way.
My Summary (2/5): Overall this was a book I didn’t even remotely enjoy. The characters are unlikable and hard to engage with, the plot is barely there, and the pacing is very slow. All of this made for a book I struggled to read, it was just so boring that I kept falling asleep while reading it. I still plan on reading “The Gods of Jade and Shadow” and hope that that book is more intriguing than this one was.
