Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Midnight Brunch by Marta Acosta

by SB Sarah | August 15, 2007 | Wednesday at 2:35 pm | 6 Comments

Marta Acosta has been emailing me random bits of smartness she encounters online, and at one point she asked if I’d read her book, and what I thought. It was a rare moment for me, because usually I can ramble with the best of them.

And honestly, this is one of the more challenging reviews I’ve written because I do not know what to say.

Did I like the book? Yup.

Do I like Acosta’s writing? Yup. It’s witty and fast paced, and I never catch myself skimming. Acosta has mastered the fine art of plot that moves damn fast but doesn’t make you feel like you can’t keep up.

Do I like the heroine? Yup. Milagro is a puzzle but that’s one of the things that’s fascinating about her. She’s half-in and half-out of so many different opposing worlds that she doesn’t quite fit where she wants to fit in, and finds that she fits in more where she least expects it. She has to balance cultural prejudice against her while struggling to reveal and fulfill her own brilliance, dealing with people who dismiss her as another brainless, buxom Latina woman, even though she’s whip-smart and wicked funny.

Did I like the plot? Yup. Milagro finds herself in the midst of another adventure wherein she has to yet again choose between determining and fighting for her own path, or letting things happen to her and dealing with them with her standard flexibility or aplomb. She’s repeatedly confronted with evidence that she’s unique and certainly very, very special, yet she believes she’s ordinary.

The secondary characters introduced in the story were clever and interesting, innovative and not at all made of or resembling cardboard. The setting was very cool - Milagro finds herself living in a resort but somehow then finds herself working for a washed-up movie star IN the resort, putting her in the unenviable position of being the help and a guest at the same time. Yet again: Milagro has to balance between two opposites and find her way through.

While there were times I wanted to hit Milagro on the head for not seeing something obviously sinister or fishy about someone, I was willing to forgive her for missing what I thought was a big clue, because there’s a lot going on around her. Only a handful of times did I mark a page and leave myself a note, or rather, Milagro a note - “Come on, now. You know that’s rather ominous right there!” Milagro, I think, is written as one of those people who stumbles through an extraordinary life completely unintentionally. Her ambition isn’t to get involved with weird people, like bizarre movie stars or exceptionally wealthy families with “genetic autosomal recessive disorders” that cause them to like red a LOT, drink blood, eat rare meat, and avoid the sun. Yet she finds herself in the midst of these extraordinary people, and has to discover that she’s more extraordinary, even among these fascinating, unique people. I want to smack her on the head at times, but I like her.

So what’s the problem? I don’t know how to classify this book!
I had this problem with the last one, too. It’s not romance, but it’s got a very strong sexual and romantic plot. Her main squeeze, Oswald, is only present in the beginning and the ending, and most of the time they interact I was folding a corner of the page because the two of them tend to let the Big Misunderstanding move in and drink all their booze while it fucks with their relationship. Oswald and Milagro are both smart, brave people, so when they have fights based on unwillingness to say something, or fear of bringing up their true feelings, it is frustrating to say the least. On the other hand, it’s often realistic, because people who are brave everywhere else are often completely neurotic when it comes to the ones who mean the most to them emotionally.

But this book isn’t a romance, because the focus is Milagro and her continuing adventures among Oswald’s family and the others like them.

It’s not a mystery, though there is a series of curious events that need to be solved. It’s not what I would call “chick lit” or even “women’s fiction” because it doesn’t deal solely with Milagro’s issues. There’s, well, decidedly little angst to correctly call it “women’s fiction,” and not nearly enough shopping for shoes or clothing to be “chick lit.”

And this is where I have to address not the author but the publisher: Hi there. I’m Sarah. I try to write reviews. And I’m stumbling here because I don’t know what this book is. Is it “fiction?” I might as well call it “words on paper” because “fiction” doesn’t say much except that the author made it up and doesn’t have to cite any sources. If I were a bookseller I wouldn’t know where to shelve it! The first cover, for Happy Hour at Casa Dracula was a cartoon with sharp edges, and that more accurately depicts the book series than the current cover. I thought it was a cookbook when I first saw it. So what gives? Do you not know how to market this book? I mean, it’s clear that there’s no easy category to place this book, and fitting something new into existing categories is always a challenge. In that way, the book mimics Milagro herself- it is but it isn’t, in so many different ways.

The best part of reading this book, lest I turn you off with my “WTF-ing” is that this book is fun to read. It’s definitely a satire of the entire dark and angsty vampire genre, and it’s easy to get into and friendly in its prose and style. It’s funny with an edge, which is about my very favorite type of humor. But if I had to shelve my books by subgenre, I wouldn’t know where to put it. Better to shelve by grade, I think.