I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

So it turns out that being a fan of But Not Too Bold doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to enjoy Cabaret in Flames.

Um.

This is much, much darker than But Not Too Bold: you have guls, who are not technically cannibals because they’re not human, eating humans. There are death squads of fascists on the streets (who are fans of guls??? For some reason???) And our protagonist’s backstory (which we do get flashbacks to, albeit not super explicit ones, and which is very plot-relevant) involves long-term CSA, being eaten long-term (bit by bit), and having her limbs removed so she couldn’t run away from it. All by the same person, to be clear.

I wasn’t ready for that at all. (Where the fuck were the content warnings, Tor??? I seriously hope the final copy has some, because my advanced reader copy didn’t.) So do know that, going in: this is much darker and grimmer than But Not Too Bold, without the whimsy and playfulness of BNTB. I loved BNTB: I did not enjoy Cabaret in Flames at all.

Only some of that was due to the darker themes – which are obviously not objectively bad, just not to my taste. What was objectively bad was quite a bit of the prose. I believe Pueyo originally wrote this book in Portuguese, and the English edition is expanded from that. From the author note and lack of credit to a translator, I’m under the impression Pueyo translated this herself. I think that’s also how things went with BNTB. But whereas BNTB only had an occasional slight stiltedness to its prose, Cabaret is often really clunky, sounding like a bad Google Translate translation. I think many individual words and sentences have been translated directly, in the ‘one word equates to one other word’ way that Google Translate does, rather than…smoothed out so that they still sound good in the new language. Examples below, all taken from my advanced reader copy.

That’s how they call the politically unwanted. Food.

A good translation would be ‘that’s what they call’, not ‘that’s how they call’.

“We envisioned this plan where we would go to Minotauro’s house when he least expected it.

‘We envisioned this plan’ is extremely clunky phrasing in English.

Rafaela was out of their range

In context, this is saying that Rafaela is out of their reach, as in has escaped or disappeared, not that she’s out of range of their radio or whatever. When you mean ‘out of their reach’, then ‘out of their range’ is very wonky.

Ariadne reciprocated the revulsion

Reminds me of ‘her breath elongated’. This is just really bad phrasing in English.

The worldbuilding was really confusing to me; guls exist, and have always existed, but not in secret? Humans know all about them? I think? In which case it makes no sense that there are no laws governing guls, no police for them, no system set up so that they can eat without murdering people. Alternatively, why aren’t the guls in hiding – you would think that humans would be very invested in wiping them out. There’s no sense of gul culture, which might be explained by their low numbers, but did mean I never really understood them as a community – there’s no consensus on who or how you should eat, for example; some guls eat their friends, some guls hunt nazis, some guls buy children and keep them in the attic to snack on. Quaint, the main gul character, has strong opinions about the latter, but most guls don’t seem to. Why not? Quaint uses funerary jewellery and tattoos to memorialise humans he’s known and cared about, but we don’t see or hear of any other guls doing anything similar. Who are they as a people? I have no clue.

The horror leans heavily on the reader’s discomfort with the themes rather than the writing itself making you feel it. The scene where Ariadne conceives of the building as a throat stands out because it’s the only time anything like it happens in the book; Cabaret doesn’t use creepy imagery or anything else to underscore the horror. It made the whole book feel like a blunt object. Quaint’s moralising, both about fascists and other guls, was very heavy-handed and lecture-y: yep, we get it, you’re a good gul! The romance seemed very abrupt to me, and I really didn’t understand what the relationship was built on.

Insofar as I can judge it, Ariadne’s trauma seemed believable to me, but I can’t decide if her abuse feels shock-value-y or not. I’m leaning towards not, because we see so little of it, it’s never gratuitous. On the other hand, flitting and dancing around it feels coy in a way I really dislike. But I’m not sure that’s a flaw in the writing; it could just be that I was never going to enjoy reading about this kind of thing, however well it was written.

Story wasn’t for me, prose was objectively quite weak. Neither will prevent me picking up anything else Pueyo writes in English, purely on the strength of BNTB.

Trigger warnings: long-term sexual abuse of a child (off-page), long-term imprisonment of a child, whatever you call eating a kid bit by bit over years (not graphic), forced amputation (off-page), animal death (off-page but we see the body), attempted suicide (hanging, mostly off-page).