This was a completely middle of the road book. It wasn't terrible, and it certainly wasn't great. It was a quick read, mostly due to the fact that there was a lot of filler in every chapter that could be skimmed without missing out on much of the plot. The first half of the second act is also basically unnecessary; the Roth family realizes that they're pawns in a dangerous plot and try to escape from the villa. An escape which drags out for nearly 150 pages even though it's super clear that they're eventually going to be recaptured and forced to compete in this game, so it just feels like stalling for time.

I also think it's super weird when authors model characters after a wish-fulfillment version of themselves. Jonathan Roth is a wildly successful fantasy novelist who lives in the mountains (same as the actual author himself, minus the "wildly successful" part), and it's super cringey how he writes other characters fawning over the protagonist's writing genius, or financial success. There are a couple points in the book where the protagonist himself is like, "Why are you doing this to us? Is it to get my royalties?"



The other weird thing about the book is how magical stuff just gets dropped randomly into what's set up as a regular thriller. A family is lured to a remote location with the intention of being forced to play the ancient Mayan version of the Mesoamerican Ballgame, where the losers are sacrificed. Which is fine, but then Jacob (the billionaire tycoon that orchestrated all of this) turns out to have supernatural powers, and then shape-changes... and then is revealed to be an actual jaguar god incarnate. The Roth family discovers they're descended from Mayans themselves... and then one of the kids during the game itself randomly discovers she has telekinetic powers which save the day. I don't mind thrillers that weave in supernatural elements to them, but this felt like the supernatural element just got dumped onto the narrative like a ton of bricks, and mostly in a completely arbitrary way, or when it benefitted the protagonists because the author couldn't figure a different way out of the corner he wrote himself into.

It was a quick read, and I liked all the Mesoamerican mythology he worked into the book... but it wasn't a good book per se. I'm not really clamoring to pick up the next book in the series, or find out what happens to these characters next.

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Created Mar 24, 2024 at 9:24pm • Submit your own review...