Tropicalia is an intriguing novel following a handful of connected Brazilians, and it drifts back and forth among narrators and timelines with the tropical breezes. Recurring themes of difficult local circumstances, the siren songs of the USA and other destinations, and way too much connection with poverty and crime. That being said, there is also great humor, joy, and attempts at love mixed among the pain and dysfunctional relationships.
Most of the core timeline centers around a New Year's Eve that is fateful for many reasons, but each time a narrator takes over, there are big leaps back to set the objects in motion, and this makes for some disruptions figuring out who is talking and when and where it's going.
Overall, these are moving characters and circumstances, and well worth a read.

Honestly, this one just didn't stick out to me. I really don't have any memory of it while coming back to write this review.

Having lived in Brazil (Rio in particular), this book oozed authenticity as well as action. Highly recommend this to any thriller reader and can't wait to read more from Harold Rogers.

There is a furious pacing to this family story, drenched in the heat, scene, and reality of Rio. Daniel, Lucia, and their mother all have unresolved and festering familial baggage. Each moving through their world coping apart yet with an air of delusion, not really acknowledging what is at the core of the schism that has held them all apart.

But Rogers takes us into the mind of each individual breaking down their past thoughts and actions and the rippling effects it had not only on each other but their very familial structure. Hurt people hurt people and selfish people completely damage psyches and identities. And then they emerge from the wreckage of themselves, moving towards mending fences and moving forward.

I enjoy multigenerational, multi-perspective novels, every voice builds the story out more and gives the reader more blocks from which they are able to garner more of a particular character. What an affecting read, I rooted for the family to heal together, it was not complete yet there ws that glimmer of hope that going forward the Cunhas would be better than the those who came before.

I liked the idea of Tropicália, but I struggled a lot with the characterization and the pacing of the book. Each characters inner monologue was such a stream of consciousness, especially Daniels. I also had trouble sometimes if I picked up in the middle of the chapter telling who was thinking at the moment because the characters felt too similar in how they communicated their thoughts. I also felt like it took half the book for me to get fully invested in the characters and what was happening. Overall I liked this anthology of stories to understand this family. I liked seeing the choices the grandparents and parents made and how that affected the children. I just wish there had been a little more defining of characters.

Holy hell the generational trauma! Loved the setting. Loved the way that the story was told. It was beautifully brutal.
Also loved the authors voice.

Special thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I really enjoyed this book told by different POVs of a time between Christmas and New Years to a family in Rio.

The dialogue was great and the family was dysfunctional. I enjoyed how each POV reminisced about the time and what happened to this dysfunctional family and the tragedy through the eyes of intergenerational voices.

I highly recommend this book. It deserves a high 4 stars maybe even 4.5 which actually would turn into a 5 star book. I gave it 4 stars because it's an outstanding.
debut.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for the eARC. A wonderful, brutally honest drama, brilliantly written in multiple voices comprising every member of a family living in Rio. The author grounds the experiences of his characters in a short, exceptionally violent, period of time between Christmas and New Years in Rio, yet allows them to each reminisce at their own pace to give the reader an understanding about how this family came to this unhappy moment. The voice of each member of the family feels authentic (and the dialogue is extraordinary) and their instincts and decisionmaking, however questionable, are described with total emotional accuracy, allowing the understanding of the larger family tragedy to be told in emotional terms by each character. In this story, individual choice means much less than the larger circumstances that created the tragedy, but they must each individually try to find a way to escape intergenerational trauma. The toughest lesson of the book is that almost no one in the family is capable of providing anything positive to any other member of the family. The only way to heal is to walk away. One of my favorite debuts of the year. Review posted simultaneously to Goodreads.

A stunning family saga with vivid characters, dysfunction, misfortune, death, all in the days leading up to NewYears Eve in Brazil.
Many thanks to Atria and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

I had a hard time with this novel. First, there are many Portuguese idioms and slang terms which went right by me, and some assumption of knowing Brazil. It's written in a stream-of-conciousness style from the viewpoints of multiple characters, eventually leading to a history of three generation of women in Rio through multiple years. Contains strong language and concepts.

Daniel Cunha has lots of problems, first and foremost he wants to win his pregnant girlfriend back. There are some police issues, a death in the family and the return of his long lost mother to contend with as well...

The Cunhas are a troubled lot - cursed you might say. And as we near New Year's Eve and the return of Daniel and his sister Lucia's mother, the curse, the trauma and the unrest come to a head in the noisy and larger than life Copacabana beach of Rio De Janeiro. If you love messy family drama, lyrical and larger than life stories than Tropicália is for you!
#Atria #Topicália #haroldrogers