- kjoannerixon
Down the Rabbit Hole
Down the Rabbit Hole is fascinating and vivid.
The prose captures the speech and mind of a child, which is incredibly difficult to do well. Both Villalobos and the translator, Rosalind Harvey, who also translated Villalobos' 2014 novel I'LL SELL YOU A DOG, deserve credit for that.
I'm not generally a huge fan of stories about anti-heroic gangsters, but the amoral feralness of Tochtli's voice overcame a lot of that hesitation. And the dramatic, unique details--Liberian pygmy hippopotamus poaching! It's a testament to the power of specific detail to tell a universal story.