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 [Larger view] | The Queen of the South
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Average user rating:  | |
 Slow and Unsympathetic | |
| Southern Queen is not a mystery - which this author writes so well. Mr. Perez-Reverte's mysteries are intellectual and fascinating. This book is neither. Nor is it a thriller, despite the thrilling nature of the first ten pages. It is an account of a woman who starts as the girlfriend of a pilot for a drug ring, moves to be girlfriend of a drug-runner who uses a boat and then, after prison, builds her own fortune in the drug trade thus becoming the Queen of the South.
The boats and planes must have gone fast, but boy, this novel did not. Maybe it was the translator (who changed from P-R's first works), but I doubt it. As much as the writing was slow, so was the plot. The layout of the book is in two intermingling parts. The author of the Queen's biography interviews characters associated with the Queen. Then it bounces back into a direct account of the Queen's life as related by that tangential character. The Queen never became a sympathetic character. The reader never could understand her motivation, wants or desires. She was not likeable; nor was she unlikeable. She was just "there". That was also her view of her own life. Too many pages were devoted to recounting her inability to expalin why she was doing what she was doing. There was no attempt at explaining her motivations. It is difficult to travel through 434 pages with someone that provokes absolutely no feelings. The plot, as noted, is thin. She goes from girlfriend to girlfriend/runner, to prisoner to mogul of an enterprise. The mogul part comes at the speed of light. The small bit of tension in the novel is in the first twenty or so pages and then the last 30 or so. The rest is slow and blah. Mr. Perez-Reverte should return to the mystery genre. Fans of his should avoid this book. | |
| Interesting, but slow. Not as good as his other novels. | |
| I've read nearly every Arturo Perez-Reverte novels that have been released in the US, and I've loved them all. They are unique, intelligent and clever.
This book deviates from the format of many of his other novels. Rather than parallel stories set in the historical past and the present - with an artifact connecting them, this story tells Teresa's story from the perspective of witnessing her story first hand as well as from the perspective of a reporter/novelist who is researching her story. The book itself moves slowly and just didn't grab me. The story is interesting enough - I enjoy it while I'm reading it. But I can put it down and not come back to it for days or weeks. It took me months to complete, rather than the few solid days of non-stop reading when I had free moments that his other books have inspired in me. My husband had the exact same experience. I'll read his next book - I've enjoyed his writing so much that he gets an automatic benefit of the doubt. But this one was a bit of a disappointment for me. | |
 An underrated novel that delivers | |
| Hispanic literature has been severely underrepresented in the United States, given the size of the Latino population in the United States. That said, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's "The Queen of the South" is a most welcome and unconventional addition to the literature.
"Queen of the South" is a story about Teresa Mendoza, a working class Mexicana that makes the most of her smarts and savvy in the hazardous and brutal drug trade. There's plenty of violence and the sort of suspense one associates with spy novels. The novel is also a story about meritocracy, feminism, and globalization; one told from a totally different perspective. The novel makes me wonder, how many Teresa Mendoza's are out there in Sinaloa or Ciudad Juarez who choose a different path in life because of obstacles, whether real or perceived. What if Teresa Mendoza had come from an upper class or upper middle class Mexican family and obtained an education? Would she have been a captain in an industry such as banking? Find out for yourself. My recommendation is that you read and reread "Queen of the South." Read the novel and savor it like a fine wine. Perhaps you'll doing something other than reading or listening to a novel and Teresa Mendoza's extraordinary tale will bring something from the novel to mind. It might be a particular scene or a passage. Whatever it is, Perez-Reverte has written a novel that delivers. Perez-Reverte, a Spanish writer popular among European readers, has written a novel with the most substantive and unique twist on the drug trade I've ever come across. It's a story that most American novelists would probably never bothered to tackle given the cultural mindset they seem locked into. Just as Spanish actors like Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas have helped open doors to Latinos in Hollywood, perhaps it might be Perez-Reverte or another Spanish novelist that hastens New York publishers to market more Latino literature to American readers. |
