a group of young adults on a vacation in mexico decide to go on an adventure to find their new german friend's missing brother and follow his message to a remote town inhabited by a community of mayans. from there, they follow the leads to the jungle where they find themselves stranded on a vine-covered hill that the natives won't let them leave anymore. after realising that they're stuck there, the group starts to prepare for long-term survival on the hill.
➕ i really like the structure of this book, the way there are no chapters so it all feels like one breathless marathon. the POV keeps jumping between the four american characters, seamlessly continuing the story from the perspective of each in turns. it's very well weaved together.
➕ especially the beginning is so delightfully ominous and builds up the tension very well. there's the innate horror of the constant heat, the jungle, travelling further and further away from safety against their better judgment, a town full of people who don't speak your language, tick-covered dogs whose shit is full of maggots. i'd argue this was the scarier part of the book, really, though i did enjoy the rest as well. then, once the characters are stuck on the hill, the way the situation just gets worse and worse no matter what they do or don't do. it all starts off so innocuous and keeps going wrong like a slowly progressing trainwreck.
➕ this belongs to the genre that i call the until dawn-esque horror and i very much love it. the characters are college students, especially the americans are so incredibly cringe and annoying or stupid or both. some people criticise that they can't enjoy a story if the characters aren't likable and relatable but i'm the opposite, when we're talking about horror where the characters are all doomed to be horribly tortured and probably eventually killed, the more annoying they are the better. but even then, i wouldn't say they're entirely unlikable. the way they try so hard to survive but nothing works made me feel pretty bad for the characters, even if they were stupid af most of the time. [spoiler] why didn't they just set the vines on fire if they had matches on them at all times like seriously
➕ LOVED the very end, the last paragraphs. [spoiler] not just the sense of the circle starting all over again but the fact that the greeks would have come in a couple more days but these stupid shits got themselves killed. love the sting of it
➖ we're always teetering on the edge of racism when the concept of a horror piece is Ooh Spooky Weird Exotic Native Americans (or an equivalent from other continents) Who Are Utterly Incomprehensible And Cryptic And Have Spooky Scary Native American Habits And Ritual Sites. wooo rural mexico, much spook, look how poor and savage they are and how they're not like us civilised white people at all, woah. like literally the mayans in this story are murderers. it makes sense in the context of the story and it's like, entirely the dumbass white kids' fault for going further and further, but context will not erase racism.
➖ this maybe dragged on a bit too long. after the promising beginning and the horrific shaft episode, things kinda slow down and get less interesting. especially [spoiler] once it's made explicit that all the horror is caused by the vines. but i did like how eric's character arc went down, his demise was so fucking gruesome, 10/10
➖ i found out after i finished reading that there's a movie made of this (and the trailer looks like horseshit) and after seeing that i went like yeah… this did feel like a book written so it could be made into a movie. although i liked it, and i haven't really read books of this format, it's obviously the horror teen flick pattern here.
⭐ score: 4- -- overall i enjoyed this, and especially the beginning was genuinely creepy with a great atmosphere. i would have preferred if the whole story had stayed more like that, where the horror is something very real and tangible, not [spoilers] spooky magical vines that can talk, i could have lived without the supernatural elements introduced here. even worse, the movie trailer talks about wow woah a sacrifice site of the native americans yeah ok i'm glad you left that out in the original, scott
a young woman who's spent her entire life travelling settles down in a small town in france with her daughter. she sets up a chocolate shop opposite the church, angering the local priest who can't stand the thought of the townspeople suddenly indulging in chocolate instead of god. the woman, vianne, couldn't care less about the opposition she's facing and ends up becoming part of the community, helping many of the troubled people and forming friendships with them.
➕ you can see from my goodreads scoring that i'm pretty picky with literature, but when i actually like a book i notice it early on, and this is one of those. this was a joy to read, not just because i love chocolate but i enjoyed the storytelling, all the little moments and poetic descriptions of food and drink. i'm also a sucker for these kinds of stories about small close-knit villages with a set of characters and archetypes who are all a bit strange in their own ways, and stories where the main character makes others' lives better. this also subverted pretty much all my expectations, i thought (especially based on the english-language cover on goodreads??) that this would be a romance story so i was expecting a tsundere kind of deal where the priest and vianne fall in love, but no. and i'm glad it wasn't so. i think the movie version might be that? i haven't ever seen it
➕ the language was so descriptive, this was the perfect book for reading out loud to myself because it was very easy to give life to the characters and their lines. i also had fun pronouncing all the french. i know that's not really about the book itself but it's about my reading experience so it goes here anyway
➕ i've read dozens of mystery/suspense/horror books in my life but this one had a much more thrilling ending climax scene compared to most of those. i never would have thought that [spoiler] it would be so intense to read about an embarrassing priest hogging a mountain of chocolate in a moment of frenzied sugar-lust
➕ i need a good cup of hot chocolate so bad
➖ while i mostly like this kind of poetic prose, i feel like sometimes the writing could have been more explicit instead because i didn't quite understand what some parts even meant. and i read the finnish translation.
➖ didn't fully understand vianne's character, she was unhappy that her own mother made her travel throughout her childhood but then when she had a child of her own, she decided to also drag her around instead of allowing her to settle down and make friends? so the little girl has to have an imaginary friend instead who [spoiler] is beginning to disappear towards the end because she's finally made real friends but "now pantoufle is coming back bc oops i'm deciding we're gonna take off again!" not really mother of the year material, and she's supposed to be like this holy angel of goodness so it doesn't really all add up. i didn't really get that part.
➖ the PoV alternates between vianne and reynaud without any implication which one we're talking about so the first few lines of each new chapter is a confusing mess.
➖ i kind of would have wanted the "evil" characters to have a redemption at the end but there was none. not even for caroline despite one good moment towards the end but no.
➖ they fed chocolate to a dog
⭐ score: 4- -- not quite a perfect four because of the extensive list of things that still bothered me. it's not a perfect book, but a charming little one regardless.
