“I think a person knows when their parents are gone for good, when the people that brought them into existence have gone out. I think the air gets heavier or the light changes, something like that. I haven’t seen the sun get dimmer yet.”
One of my highly anticipated 2024 releases was an early release through BOTM, and you know I snatched it up lickety-split. Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster 2024) is Lonesome Dove meets One Hundred Years of Solitude,and it is 249 pages of near perfect storytelling, making it my first five star read of the year. It’s going to be hard to top this one.
When Antonio Sonora is born, his soul is marked for hell as the family is “in arrears” due to centuries of horrific acts. Death does not take him, deciding to wait and watch the baby grow up. By 1895, Antonio has proven himself to be good with a gun and attracted to trouble, like the Sonora men who’d come before him. But he’s a bad guy with a mostly good heart, and when he decides to rob a train in Laredo to better provide for his wife and children, you’re going to root for him. When he is shot, Death decides yet again not to take his soul, and Antonio becomes a most wanted man – El Tragabalas, Bullet Swallower.
In 1964, a strange woman shows up at Jaime Sonora’s home with a book about the Sonora family. Jaime, a famous actor living a relatively charmed life, is curious, and against his father’s wishes, he reads the book. Not long after, a strange man emerges from the shadows and Jaime welcomes him like an old friend, despite his father’s insistence that the man’s presence in the home is neither safe nor wise; the Sonoras have a debt to pay, and Death will eventually collect.
This is a story of original sin, of family, of adventure, of legends and immortality. It’s a western gilded in magical realism, and I loved it.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 