Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. Mona, a Peruvian novelist currently at Stanford, wakes up to find bruises all up and down one side of her body and no memory of how they got there. She gets an alert on her phone that reminds her that her first book is nominated for a prestigious literary award in Sweden, with a large cash award, and she decides this is a very good time to get out of town. Mona will spend four days in a small village where her fellow nominees from all over the world will give talks (mostly about the politics in their corner of the world, although Mona is alone in noticing that one nominee has just copied pages and pages of a Beckett novel and is passing them off as his own thoughts) all while Mona is drinking, getting high with her vape pen, watching porn and desperately trying to ignore the messages from back home, even as they get more and more menacing. This is such a smart book with great characters and an unforgettable lead in Mona.

I recall liking Savage Theories, I DNF-ed Dark Constellations (got more than halfway through and the story just didn't seem to be coming together), and I DNF-ed this one after chapter 1. The critique of US identity politics by having Mona (who's clearly coded as a white Peruvian) claim to be indigenous to score points at her university and in the art world is... not it. Just not interested in spending my time on this book.

Mona was being vetted for a particular purpose and the content was far more sexually explicit than was appropriate for the project at hand. I didn't feel this was conveyed by the description of the book. The character of Mona seemed interesting and the premise of the book was intriguing, but I felt like I was reading a different book than the one described by the marketing content.