The Storyteller's Death - Ann Dávila Cardinal - ★.½

AUTHOR: Ann Dávila Cardinal

GENRE: Historical Magical Realism

PUBLICATION DATE: October 4, 2022

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: An OwnVoices family saga with elements of magical realism. Meant to be Adult Fiction, reads as a poorly-written YA soap opera. The plot had great potential but fails to make a mark. Flat character development. Way too much secret keeping and miscommunication. Way too many subplots. Didn't work for me. YMMV.

Plot Preview:

Every summer since Isla Larsen Sanchez's father passed away, her mother has been leaving her in Puerto Rico with her grandmother and her great-aunt while she stays back home in New Jersey and drinks. This began when Isla was eight. Now at eighteen, she learns that she has a special ability passed down from the cuentistas (storytellers) in her mother's side of the family: the stories of the dead cuentistas are brought to life and replayed in front of her repeatedly every day. Is this a gift or a curse? Is Isla the only current Sanchez with this ability? Can she stop it somehow? Should she?

The story comes to us in older Isla's first-person perspective, narrating her teen experiences from the contemporary time.

Bookish Yays:

🍦 The concept. Gotta give credit to the idea, even if the execution was juvenile.

🍦 The whole slumber-party-icecream scene. The only well-written scene in the entire book, which is a sad thing to say for an OwnVoices book with magical realism.

Bookish Okays:

🌴 The magical realism. Had the most potential, and some of the dream-reality scenes were even tense. But we barely get to explore this angle as all the magical content comes only from Isla’s experience even though the family had other cuentistas.

🌴 Puerto Rico. Excellent description of the location, but barely anything positive about the culture or the society in the 1970s. We barely even realise that it’s the 1970s! And nothing about colonialism or racism. In fact, the only racism we see is what Isla’s PR family doles out to another local community.

Bookish Nays:

🍺 Isla. Whiny, impulsive, and illogical. You might say she’s a typical teen, but I picked up the book expecting an adult work, so I wasn’t prepared for such a typical YA protagonist.

🍺 The character development of almost all the characters – utterly flat. What you see is what you get.

🍺 Can someone give me one good reason how, out of so many cuentistas from the Puerto Rican side of the family, did a half-white, non-local teenager end up as ‘the chosen one’? She was the least eligible!

🍺 The numerous subplots. Not needed in a story where the main plot point was intriguing enough. It made the novel disjointed. The murder mystery angle came out of nowhere.

🍺 The poor pacing and the ad hoc time jumps. The first quarter was nothing but build-up. I also didn’t get why the story had to come from older Isla writing about the 1970s, i.e. the time she was 18. There’s literally no utilisation of the advantage of posterity; no foreshadowing, no mature insights, nothing!

🍺 The plot development – so predictably straightforward! Barely any twists or surprises, especially when Isla goes a-digging into what it means to be a cuentista. Every solution comes her way almost directly, no challenge at all.

🍺 The excessive secret-keeping. A good chunk of the story involves the whole Sanchez family not telling Isla anything and then saying she does not know anything. 🤦🏻‍♀️

🍺 The token checklist of inclusions, especially the character sexual-preference reveal that comes out of nowhere in the final 10% and doesn’t even have anything to do with the plot.

🍺 The instantaneous flip-around in her mother’s alcoholism at the end. It’s never that easy for severe alcohol addicts to stop drinking!

🍺 The ending. Way too happy and instantaneous for such a plot – straight out of a Bollywood movie, albeit without the dancing. One key reveal is left dangling.

Overall, I expected far better from this book given the premise. But the execution didn’t do any justice to the potential. This is supposedly the author’s first book for adults. Prior to this, she wrote YA fiction, so perhaps that YA tone seeped into this book as well, and not in a good way. If I evaluate it from a YA lens, it does only slightly better, but not by much.

This gets a no from me. But not all reviews are so scathing, so perhaps you might like to peruse those and see if the book appeals to you.

Not really recommended, but it might work better for YA readers. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Don’t expect Isabel Allende levels of magical realism.

My thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark for providing the DRC of “The Storyteller's Death” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work better for me.