PositiveBooklist\"This is a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale set in a society where there is no center to hold; where the army, police force, and drug cartels all function as gangs with complex agendas and shifting alliances; and where human life comes unspeakably cheap. Solares offers a harrowing vision of how it all works, or doesn’t, from the bribes that grease the wheels to the blood that paints the walls, to the last gasps of the peaceful town and the natural world around it. Exposition occasionally intrudes upon the fiction, and the lack of linearity will deter some readers, but this is another urgent and vital work from a writer to watch.\
Ross Raisin
RaveBooklistAs Tom tries to prove himself professionally, and the team rebounds from a terrible season to a strong one, Raisin depicts their world with astonishing clarity ... The book is utterly contemporary—players scan online forums for gossip and cocoon themselves with electronics during long bus rides—yet the stifling pressure of the men to hide their relationship, and the locker-room and fan hazing, suggest the mid-twentieth century. (Leave it to sports to turn back the clock on social issues.) While many references and assumptions will be more familiar to British than American readers and soccer fans, Raisin’s transporting and acutely observed novel speaks to us all. First-rate.
