PositiveBOMBCastillo’s prose luxuriates in intellectual snobbery, wielding it as both shield and self-inflected wound ... Castillo is relentless in exposing these absurd desires ... While the first half of Fresh, Green Life seems to stall, caught in controlled delay and imagined outcomes, this deliberation isn’t the plot’s absence, it’s its launch. The second half gives way to movement, conflict, and consequences. That structure...is right at home in the broader arc of Castillo’s work ... Castillo’s work is marked by a distinct and nimble experimentalism that’s only growing in its playfulness, generosity, and gravity ... Fresh, Green Life is about having a mind that believes it can juke the messiness of being human, of thinking yourself smarter than your circumstances, and realizing that having an intellect isn’t the same as having a life.
