This felt like a guilty pleasure book, the build-up of plot almost lost me in the middle. Overall, quite good. 3/4 stars ( )

So, so good. ( )

Really not my thing.

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This is the story of Meche, the woman and the girl, in Mexico city. As a women she returns for her father's funeral and reluctantly deals with family and friends. As a girl, she struggles her awkward way through high school, ignoring homework and generally not getting along with people. Her family is dysfunctional, her friends are weird, and she learns how to do magic.

I struggled so much to like this book. It is well structured, and the writing is smooth and often very fluid. But lord, the characters are so trite and tedious. The main character, Meche, is sulky and nerdy and the same as every other math-obsessed, sulky nerd in every other teen book. The problem is, she's the same as an adult! She's utterly insufferable.

Her friends are the same-- the poor kid who escapes toxic masculinity into books and gets called names for it. The chubby rich girl princess whose parents (gasp!) love her and don't want her to fall in with a bad crowd.

Ugh.

It took me forever to finish this tiny book because I kept rolling my eyes and shaking my head at the stupid, stupid kids who were just as stupid and clumsy as they grew up. I liked nothing about a single character in this book, except that Meche's father has pretty good taste in music. ( )

Minus a star for the sometimes uneven pacing and sentences, I ended up enjoying this story. I wasn't sure I would, and I put it down and picked it up several times. I've never been to Mexico City, so I can't tell you how authentic the setting is. It felt to me like any big city. In the end, I'm glad I read it, which is a nice place to end up. I read it after it was recommended to me by a Latina on Twitter. She loved it. I loved Sebastian. ( )