Alejandro Murguia

Decent set of highly personalist war stories Nicaragua, red/nationalist side, southern front. Not much combat writing but good on feel of the war from the POV of an 'internationalist' volunteer. Captures the chaos and ad hoc nature of the whole thing. However uses Spanglish as a literary affection which I find annoying. This is obviously a set of stories about Spanish speakers talking to each other/ to themselves in Spanish. So writing the book in Spanish makes some sense. Writing it in English to hit the larger market also makes some sense. Authors and publishers make such decisions all the time. However writing in English with random sentences and sentence fragments to remind the reader that this is really happening in Spanish is simply a silly literary affection IMO. There are a few phrases like Mana Blanca that may be necessary. In the main it is lame. IMO. YMMV.… (mer)