1.5 stars

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of this one! I liked the author’s first novel translated to English (This World Does Not Belong to Us) but remember finding it a bit confusing and opaque at times. Unfortunately, Freire’s second offering in English translation takes that opaqueness to another level. The premise really drew me in - Mildred is a girl wronged by her village, and so curses it after her death. But then all the chapters deviate from Mildred to the townsfolk and the aftermath of the curse, and all the different POVs make it feel too disjointed. I’m also sad to say that somehow a violent curse felt quite dull. It took me over a week to read this tiny book, which is indicative of how unmotivated I was to pick it up.

I did love the collage art at the start of every chapter!

This book started out very strong but kind of lost me towards the middle and the end. I liked how it flowed, but I definitely got lost in the language and translation.

A Carnival of Atrocities is a challenging read - dense, at times confusing, and not always easy to follow. There were moments where I struggled to stay with it, and some passages felt deliberately opaque. But despite that, I found it to be a powerful and thought-provoking work. It won’t be for everyone, but if you’re willing to engage with its complexity and its extensive depictions of casual cruelty, there’s a lot to take away.

I am not sure what I just read.

The title is captivating, the cover is gorgeous, the writing was stunning. But the storyline was a blur of reality and... something else. It was incredibly hard to follow but too intriguing to put down. Did I like it? Yes. It was definitely an experience. Would I recommend it? No. I don't think so. Unless I did it selfishly, so you could finish it and tell me what the heck was happening.

The book opens with a young girl who is forcefully removed from her home when her mother dies and her father disappears. Then, we shift to the perspectives of nine of the townsfolk who remember the girl as a witch and are on a strange journey of sorts to hunt down a group of runaways.

Cursed, afraid, and perhaps completely out of their minds, incredibly odd and horrific things begin to happen to them on this journey. A priest cuts off his own ears, a woman loses her footing and falls to her death and when her husband grieves over her dead body, someone else sneaks up to the woman who is attempting to console him and cracks her skull in with a rock. A man who owes a debt removes the gold teeth straight out of the mouth of a dying traveler; the food for the trip goes rotten; someone sets some of the others, and maybe themselves, on fire; and a young man upon coming face to face with his father, stakes himself in the chest.

Then again, this might all be wrong.

A hypnotic story of treachery and fear that howls like the wind in your ears. There's a message here somewhere but I'll be damned if I can decipher it.

This one just didn’t work for me, and I failed to connect with it or relate to any of the characters. In fact much of the time I simply couldn’t follow what was going on. It started out fairly straightforwardly but then descended into a sort of fever dream, which left me mostly baffled, and certainly unengaged. It’s set in a remote Andean town in Ecuador and centres on a young girl, Mildred. When her mother dies, she is stripped of all that she own and is sent to live in a monastery. I was never clear as to why poor Mildred was so badly treated. Years later a series of strange and fantastical occurrences seem to set up a sort of collective delirium amongst the other residents and it all seems to spiral out of control. The line between dream and reality is blurred and the multi-layered and complex narrative, told from the perspectives of nine other characters, only added to my confusion.

Did not finish book. Stopped at 48%.

I really wanted to like this book. The concept is great, and I found the first chapter (which provides the impetus/backstory for everything that follows) very compelling.

However, the subsequent chapters don't deliver on the premise, in my opinion. I found myself getting very bored, and despite it being a short book and making it nearly halfway through, I had zero motivation to keep reading and no hope that it would improve. (This was on track to be a 2-star read at best, with 1 of those stars coming entirely from the first chapter.)

In addition to being a slog to read, there is a lot of casual cruelty in the book. This is definitely intentional, and it suits the book's theme of examining mundane violence in a small, isolated village. But this was one of the aspects that made it difficult to read. Additionally, the story often presents regular human bodies (including disability) as a sort of body horror: skin conditions, scars, fatness, and visual impairment are all written as horror in and of themselves, and I really didn't care for this. I was okay with this in the first chapter, as we get an alternative perspective: the narrator-protagonist's skin condition is horrifying and "other" to the townspeople, but her mother finds beauty in that difference and helps the narrator see herself as beautiful. This perspective doesn't resurface again, though, at least not in the first half of the book.

'A Carnival of Atrocities' is a work of hypnotic poetic beauty, though very sharp and violent, traversing a fragile line between myth and reality. It evokes the style of folklores and fables and explores the corrosive nature of collective guilt, which can swallow a society whole. The desolation and corruption of Cocuán and the mass delirium the characters suffer also serve as a metaphor about the systemic injustices meted out to the weaker sections of society and how they have the potential to collectively strike back, eventually decimating that rotten core.

Cocuán, a lost and forgotten village between the jungle and the cold of the Andean mountains, is on the verge of disappearing from memory. Mildred was born there, and there she was also stripped of her animals, her home, and her land after her mother's death. Years later, a series of strange events, episodes of madness and delusions, will make its inhabitants remember the legend of old Mildred and once again feel the shadow of death that has haunted the town ever since. The voices of nine characters tell us about the past and present of a doomed place and the miracle of
Mother God on Earth.
Reading this novel will transform readers into inhabitants of Cocuán, sweeping them away by an overflowing language that blurs the lines between dreams and reality. In this ensemble work, Natalia García Freire portrays the hypnotic Andean universe, a privileged setting for her imagination, unique in contemporary Latin American literature.

Sometimes, horror books have "flawed" or "unhinged" characters that make you think "this person is only slightly left of normal." THIS book introduces you to characters that are deliciously fucked-up. Certain character's perspectives (*cough* Ezequiel *cough*) were so unflinchingly amoral that I couldn't look away - what were these people going to do next? In a way, none of these characters had done anything to deserve what happened to them. Which is the same as saying they did deserve it.

A short read with devastating impact. I look forward to seeing more work by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Full disclosure, I ended up DNFing this around 35%. I found the writing style very dry and matter-of-fact which just didn’t work for me. There is a lot of gore and dramatic events going on, but the writing made it difficult for me to stay engaged so I’m putting this one down. Admittedly, this style seems to be pretty common in litfic and it doesn’t always bother me. However, since the description specifically mentioned the “vivid language” I was expecting something a bit more engaging, and not just descriptive.

I know this work is translated, so I’m not sure if this was a translation choice to reflect the original writing style, or simply the translator’s style.

When Mildred’s young life in a tiny Ecuadorian Andes town is upended by the death of her mother, the townspeople in Cocuan forcibly remove her from her home and bring her to a monastery. So begins the reader’s journey to the absurd in a poetically written short tale of retribution bound to a magical fairy tale like view of the struggle to live and coexist in a setting fraught with spirits and prayer.

There are many POVs which unfold in what turned out to be a complex adventure that was difficult to plow through and even more difficult for me to interpret. Has Mildred returned to punish those that hurt her? Does the Church represent a source of salvation or one of lost souls? Has the author introduced animals with greater humanity than the actual humans? So much interpretation is needed to decide what the author is trying to say.

Two little stars for a book with which I just did not connect despite its lovely language. My thanks to NetGalley and World Press for a prepublication copy in exchange for my review. It will be published on April 1, 2025 and fans of this author and of symbolic tales of magical realism will want to read it.

This was too soft for me. Too full of whispers. I needed more structure to fully feel what I wanted to feel, more actual happenings and less vagueness. A very good book that I wanted more from.

Unfortunately this didn’t work for me and I DNFd 35% in. It sounded like an interesting story and I liked the first chapter but the writing style isn’t my cup of tea, with too much telling over showing

This book is a wild ride from the start! If you love LatinAmerican dark Litfic, I’m sure you will like this one!! Loved the creepy small town called Cocuán by the jungles of Ecuador. It’s told from the perspective of nine characters so this isn’t a book you want to rush through. I did take notes on them and that made it so much easier to keep track of who is who. It’s worth it. The prose is beautiful and really sucks you in despite some characters being unlikeable.

An internationally beautiful book about horrifying things. Natalia Garcia Freire has captured the essences of sin, horror, cruelty, and the most loathsome aspects of the humanity with such poetic language and love for what we can, and might, be were we to take the time to think on what we do rather than what was done to us, to look at what we do to the world rather than what we can get from it, to consider the love with which others treat us rather than what we can take from them at no cost to ourselves, that world might half as deserving of the gift she has given us.

Thank you to Netgalley and Word Editions for this arc.

Now, again I need to preface this review with the information that I read this book ages ago and then life took over and now I need to come back and review these books finally.

I also have to say I was so busy that it feels like it’s been years since the beginning of the year.

Anyway, this book was about a specific girl and the town in which she inhabited. It was similar to another novel I read last year which also had some magical elements but this one was more hazy in nature.

This novel follows multiple characters conveying the story of the town and also the girl.

Personally, while I think I did enjoy it, I don’t think I was in the mood for it at the time. It was a bit too disjointed at the time. However, I do recommend it for people who are into those mystical types of books.

Definitely out of my comfort zone.

This was just okay - it’s very hallucinogenic and folktale like which I didn’t love as I don’t gravitate towards that style of writing. This is a novel told through short stories, each one from the perspective of a different person involved. I liked the opening story which set the scene but I didn’t feel very attached to the rest of the book. I have the author’s previous work which I am excited still to try and hope I like it a bit better.

A sort of mangled fever dream that is at once evocative/ immersive and quite confusing. We follow the ugliness of a dying town as it enacts a violent end both itself and the inhabitants. The writing and language is beautiful, poetic and surreal.

We start this book with Mildred, whose mother has died and whose father has disappeared, and whose entire existence is taken away as she screams and curses the townspeople. Each chapter is told by a different character and little by little we discover the horrors that the curse may have inflicted on them.

This is such an strange and fantastical story. I honestly didn't know where reality ended and fantasy began and it packs so much in 80-some pages.

Cocuán, a small town in Ecuador is doomed by a curse. Upon the death of Mildred Capa’s mother and the subsequent abandonment by her father, Mildred was intent on maintaining and working the farm. However, the parish priest and townspeople had other ideas, not to help sick Mildred, but to benefit themselves. They killed her beloved animals, set the house on fire, and sent Mildred to live at the monastery enduring the abuse of Father Santamaría.

After Mildred’s death, we learn from the perspective of those who wronged her and paid a price. We also discover the evil and repulsive character of the residents of Cocuán.

Though A Carnival of Atrocities is quick read, it is not an easy read. I had problems distinguishing the characters’ delusions from reality. However, the story is engaging, and the characters are well-developed. What I enjoyed the most are the gorgeous and vivid translated prose.

Yes, A Carnival of Atrocities will appeal to a niche audience, but I recommend this novel to those who enjoy fine literature.

(This review will be posted on UnderratedReads on April 1, 2025