I believe this review is finely written, but it suffers from the issue of being another “thought dump” just like Truth & Beauty. This is partially because it doesn’t get to the point and partially because of the sprinkling of Spanish throughout the entire work. When presented with a language foreign to you, you’re forced to either piece together what it could mean from context clues or you go to a website to translate it for you. Either one creates a pause in the writing that will lead to an unpredictable pace depending on the reader and the choice they made for how to deal with it.

Following up on the first point I mentioned, about this being a “thought dump”. I’m not expecting every piece of writing to have the clean language and formatting of an analytical piece, but I do expect them to respect my time as a reader. There is a massive block of text showing the formerly unpublished review taking up almost 3 pages of my screen. Terms like “Trumpian” are thrown around as if tying a book to a word referencing a bad president makes the book inherently bad. Why is the book “Trumpian”? If the book is so bad, why do you need to drag a president into this?

These questions come to mind, but there’s only one real question that the author already knows of.

“Why do you want to tell this story?”

The book’s bad, I get it, I really do. My culture is appropriated all the time by people who know nothing about it trying to defend how it’s “supposed to be” and I don’t think it’s cool. However, I won’t spend exactly 2,438 words beating a dead horse because there are other forms of media that are better suited for this type of dialogue.

This is a debate transcript, and I wish it were more.