Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

***SPOILER ALERT***

I started reading this on audiobook a year ago from the library and was forced to stop about 1/3 of the way in.  But it was totally stuck in my head even as I read many others.  I waited until I could give it my proper time and attention, and start from the beginning in paperback.  And I'm so glad I did.  

This book has been out for a while and is well-discussed already.  So I'm going full spoiler with my review.  Because Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorite books.  

This book follows a dual protagonist format, with both neighbor Maite and thug Elvis looking for a young woman named Leonora who has suddenly gone missing after taking some politically charged photographs.  For me, the characters are what really make this book amazing.  Maite is a mental-health disaster sort of like Linda from Joanna Cannon's A Tidy Ending, another favorite book -- not someone I'd like to spend a lot of time with, but really fun to read about.  I know people like Maite.  We all do.

Maite is anxious and bored, and lives in a fantasy world of comics and the lies she tells her coworker, Diana, about fake lovers.  Elvis is somewhat less delusional, but is forced to leave a lot of blanks in what he knows about his boss El Mago (The Magician) due to the nature of his job on a goon squad.  He does have dreams and aspirations of one day living the way El Mago does, in stark contrast with what he knows of his own life -- just as Maite feels about her body and her prospects as a single woman.

Maite and Elvis have the opposite of insta-love, where characters have love at first sight and it makes the book super boring.  This entire book is the slow burn of how perfect these two lonely, unmoored people are for each other.  They don't even meet until the end of the book, how amazing is that?  What a skilled writer.  

Neither of them has any meaningful family connections -- in a country and culture where that means everything.  Neither of them believes in anything, although Elvis is an enforcer on a right-wing goon squad.  They both have very similar low self-esteem about their overall life prospects and romantic worth.  They have the same connoisseur taste in music and books.  And they both need to find Leonora for different reasons.  They've both been used and discarded in love, she by Cristobalito, who dumped her for someone better in bed, and he first by an older American who used him as a sex worker, then by the beautiful Cristina, who recruited guys for a cult.

I'm focusing on this because of the negative reviews where people are saying "there's nobody to like in this book."  And that's nonsense.  You know what book has nobody likeable and is horrible to read?  The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.  Everyone is horrible in that book, including the guy who got murdered for supposedly trying to help rescue the trafficked women.  Even the little dog, Benoit, is a traitor.  There's nobody to like in The Paris Apartment partly because the protagonist, Jess, is a petty thief.  Petty thief Maite is a million times more likeable.  And the hilarious Maite has a character arc, unlike the entitled, not-funny Jess.

Maite and Elvis are both very gray characters.  But first of all Leonora, the one driving the entire plot, is entirely likeable.  It's fair to call her quite a heroine, although it's also fair for Maite to totally hate her and the reader to empathize with Maite.  

But Leonora is a beautiful and very popular upper-class girl who supports the poor even at the risk of her own life and personal wealth, going against her wealthy uncle who supports her financially, finances a pack of thugs, and can and will send them to kill her.  She dates lower-class boys who work in print shops, because she's not a super snob.  Her one and only failing in this book is trusting Emilio, dumping Ruben for the rich, handsome boy who betrays her in the end.  But if you can't find anybody to like in this book, you didn't notice Leonora, who was a very good kid.  People needed to be very, very afraid to speak up in that time and place.  And Leonora did it as best she could.

Also Maite is actually likeable, and Elvis is even more so.  Maite has a tremendous character arc in this book.  She literally saves the cat, for one thing, right?  She doesn't even like cats, or Leonora.  But she continues feeding the cat at her own expense the whole time.  Fortunately this cat doesn't poop or she'd have to clean that up too.  But she's buying food for this animal the whole time, and in the end she's riding the bus.  So she doesn't even get reimbursed after all that.  She doesn't even get her car back.

But by the end, she's softened and opened her heart to Ruben -- who at first she treated like garbage because of his class and his looks.  But once she saw what an actual piece of crap Emilio was, for me that was an excellent bit of growing up on Maite's part.  Just cashing the reality check on who would be the better boyfriend, Emilio or Ruben, was massive.  Getting beaten up brought Maite crashing down to Earth 1.

I can't help but think people who thought there was nobody to like in this book must have taken a very surface-level read of it.  Because although I may not want either Maite or Elvis in my life, I really did want them to get together.  I felt like they would be better people together than either of them could be alone.  Because she never had anybody that actually liked or got her before.  Elvis was somebody who had seen both her and Leonora, <i>and chose her over Leonora</i>.  Because they needed each other.  Nobody really needed Elvis before.  He saved her life, just like in her comic books.  ::mwah::

Also the part about who El Mago was, that was not a plot twist for me.  The twist was that he didn't actually know where Leonora was, hadn't personally been the one to disappear her.  I figured out about the uncle/El Mago and Emliio being smoochers. I got that Emilio was trash as soon as he came looking for the camera.  I got that her uncle was El Mago when Elvis went to Mago's house and saw the picture with the two little girls.

The subtext, where Elvis is one of the people who's being crapped on the hardest by El Mago, Emilio, and the other powers that be, and that he legitimately found himself with very few other options at the time, seems to escape a lot of people.  Maybe they haven't been to Mexico.  Maybe they imagine Tepito is like any small town in America that sucks and is hard to get out of.  They can't imagine what "dirt poor" is to a guy like Elvis.  They haven't seen 7-year-old kids walking around Mexico alone selling gum at midnight.  I'm not saying what Elvis did was good or okay.  I'm saying he was itching for something better on every page of the book.  He was never comfortable with it.  And there was no transparency.  He did a good job of finding a way out for himself IMHO.

So I totally loved this book, no surprise there.  Exceptional writing once again.  I think the reviews that found the plot twists at the end shocking are kind of funny.  I saw pretty much all of that coming, except for Maite handling it as well as she did.  I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't get as much of the interaction between Maite and Elvis.  Because I think the two of them would really change each other for the better.