It's a dystopian story set in NYC where Latino accents are super sexy, all Asians look the same, and third-world smells are a thing.

And an eye patch. The eye patch practically stole the show.

I love that Santino Hassel's review is the top review for this book, it's a good match.

So, I'm not going to review the main storyline, there are 191 reviews that already do that, and I read through every single one looking for just one solitary mention of the egregious and offensive content in this book.

Guess what? Not a single mention.

And before anyone replies with oh, that didn't age well or it was written in 2012 excuse, sorry, I am not having it. This book was published in 2012 and is set in a fictional dystopian New York City. This book was read and reviewed mainly in 2012, 2016, with some reviews from 2018-2024. When is the cutoff then for offensive material? The othering and white western gaze in this is so OTT, I cannot believe that anyone could miss dozens of examples.

One of the easiest ways to understand how fucking offensive something is, is to switch the group of people out, so just imagine if English-speaking people are described by their inability to say certain letters or sounds in another language. Insert 'Americans wailing while running from the World Trade Center' as a normalized description for Americans in distress. Sounds offensive, right? I would never use a tragedy that a group of people endured as descriptive flair. Revolting.

In the book there is a Latino MC with an eye patch. This is not disability rep. Also no mention of the hyperfixation on his eye patch in a single review.

For reference, it's 1960 in the book, but clearly an anachronistic 1960 (computers, phones, wifi, etc), the Vietnam War was from 1954-1975, yes, this is relevant.

Excerpts:

The rest of his face— if you could even see beyond the patch— was graceful and beautifully proportioned, in a swarthy, exotic, Latin way.

“I don’t think that’s cilantro,” Javier said. He even made the word cilantro sound sexy.

“They say mint and lamb went well together— but, hey. They still eat termites in Ghana, so what do ‘they’ know?” Nelson held up his half of verde. “I’ve never really been much for mint.”

...while Nelson pondered what he would ever do if he accidentally told Javier to “keep an eye” on anything. The potential for awkwardness just kept building.

“Which one?” demanded the driver. “The, ah… Hispanic—”
“The guy with the eye patch,” Marianne shrieked. At least, Nelson thought, he hadn’t been the one to say it.

Tim did lock gazes with Javier, then. It was disconcerting with the eye patch— how was it that in the week they’d been chatting online, Javier had never thought to mention the eye patch?

Or maybe, despite the eye patch, he couldn’t get past the last few lines Javier had typed in chat, less than a week before....

“Maybe there’s a dentist around here. They’d probably be some creepy- assed Soviet- trained Ukrainian dentist with a cash- only operation, but they’d be able to do something to keep my tooth in by the time I could get to my regular guy. Right?”

“Is it all retro in South America,” Randy asked from under the veg- o- mix, “with cows and chickens roaming around and coconuts falling from the trees?”

“But it’s the rise of leisure time,” Randy said sarcastically. “The biggest thing since the Industrial Revolution. Aren’t all the natives dancing around and being all cultural and stuff because they’re not stuck scratching out a living from the land?”

Tim wanted to be annoyed with Javier, but kept forgetting because he was so damn interesting—and really, wasn’t that what had first drawn Tim to him to begin with? If only he’d mentioned the thing about his eye….

Obviously, Javier hadn’t gotten a very good look at Nelson. Though he wasn’t sure seeing him with two eyes would have made any difference.

Although Javier was looking directly at the two- year- old, he had a hard time making sense of the next thing he saw… and he suspected seeing it with two eyes wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference.

Despite the fact that the immigrants here lived in apartment buildings rather than corrugated metal lean- tos, the third- world smell wasn’t that different from the shantytowns of Caracas. Piss and garbage. Smoke. Fish. The fish bodies rolled in on trucks filled with ice in the wee hours of the morning, where they were traded in the back rooms of the jewelry exchanges and the bail bonds shops.

The smell of Asian cooking was strong. A glance into the adjacent kitchen revealed it was just as cluttered with items as the rest of the apartment, baskets of fresh produce, strange, foreign- looking pots and pans, a steamer, a huge ladle. (Commentary while being inside a Vietnamese-American apartment.)

If Pham Thi Mai had been an American woman— or, heck, even a white woman of almost any nationality— Nelson would have hugged her, or at least patted her on the arm. But bà ngoai didn’t do displays of affection. Even arm- pats.

One of the parting comments Tim’s ex had made was that maybe the whole “gay thing” wasn’t worth it. Maybe he wanted to settle down and have a family, before all the women who hadn’t had their tubes snipped were taken.

He could listen to his own name all day in that Latin- flavored accent.

None of them mentioned how gross it was to be drinking from something that, for all they knew, a vagrant could have urinated in.

His features were exotic: striking and dark.

“Alejandro wouldn’t be caught dead with a box of Nicaraguans.” Tim wished he had the guts to ask him to repeat himself. The way he said “Nicaraguans” was sexy, too.

Maybe because he was Cuban. A rich Cuban. If such a thing even existed. Nelson tended to learn his politics as he needed them, and he’d never kept company with a Cuban before, so he only knew the generalities: Bay of Pigs, dictatorship, boat people, embargo. That sort of thing. (Uh... seriously? Who were the first people to flee Cuba? SMH.)

Javier’s uncovered eye narrowed. Probably the one behind the eye patch, too.

Even with just the one eye, Javier gave Nelson a look that told him they weren’t.

Javier looked at him, hard. Nelson felt like he was being X- rayed. Maybe losing sight in one eye was like losing one of the full senses. It sharpened whatever remained to a preternatural point.

If he’d finished college in four years. If they even started at eighteen in Costa Rica, like they did in the States. If the degree itself wasn’t bogus.

A third-world staple and a tightwad’s delight.

Javier claimed that saying those three little words in a time of emergency “didn’t count,” in that sexy accent of his….

Javier stared at Nelson. His uncovered eye was narrowed. Probably, his covered eye was too.

The holding cell was crowded. Rioters? Looters? Probably plenty of those. The majority of the two dozen men inside were black and Hispanic, no big surprise.

The scene in front of Nelson’s building was like something out of an old war movie— a movie where a bunch of wailing Vietnamese villagers armed with garden tools had been fired upon by tanks and machine guns.

“Hey,” he said to an Asian man who refused to make eye contact.

“Then let’s get over there and look. Because I can’t think of a politically correct way to say it— but I don’t think I can pick Nelson’s kid out of a bunch of other Chinese.”

“Vietnamese,” Tim said, though the word was lost among the car alarms and the wailing and the sounds of rushing water. Although maybe that was for the best, because their neighbors were probably Chinese, so maybe Randy was actually sort of right.

Tim was looking for dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. He was looking for an Asian kid—but since so many of them had been rounded up in Chinatown, about half the children were Asian.

And while Tim had always prided himself on his civil activism and his political correctness, he realized with growing dismay that (to him, at least) all the screaming, crying Asian kids looked more or less…alike.

“I know you’re half- blind, but even so, do I seriously look like I give two shits about money?”

It was hopeless. Tim would dredge up the memory of exactly what Bao looked like in his mind’s eye— he’d fix on some detail, the length of his hair, the way his T- shirt hung from bony shoulders, the panic on his face while Nelson called the morgue— but when Tim actually searched for him, the only thing he saw was a bunch of Asian kids.

But he wasn’t entirely Asian. He was half-Caucasian. And that would differentiate him.

The door shut, then locked. The Asian woman tossed her hair, and said distinctly, though the L sounded a bit like an R, “Asshole.”

The Asian lady shook her head. “My son’s father is here. On TV. They no listen.” And while Tim hated to think that all Asians looked the same to him, he was particularly struck by the way her annoyed pout looked a hell of a lot like Bobby’s.

The woman’s face lit up at the sound of Nelson’s name. “Yes— Nelson.” That L sounded a bit like an R, too. “He here. On TV.”

The cop took an inordinate amount of time squinting at the address, until Nelson said, “They’re all with me,” and indicated Tuyet and Bao along with Tim and Javier. Including a couple of Asian faces in the group seemed to do the trick.

The crowd around the wreaths thinned as some of the mourners let their family members escort them off to the side, to weep. Most of the immigrants in the building had seen enough tragedy in their lives that they were able to avoid big public displays of grief.

Tuyet and Bobby joined Nelson by the streetlight where he stood between Tim and Javier. They found a spot beside Tim, even though that meant walking around Nelson to avoid falling in beside Javier. The eye patch freaked them out…