I had planned on giving this 3 stars, and I appreciate that this is a debut work, but I kept disliking the book more and more as it went on. The nicest thing I can say about it is that I liked how it incorporated Spanish and Mexican culture. This story wants to be a diverse and more YA take on dark magical competition stories like Phantasma, but it didn't pull it off in my opinion. 

I thought the writing quality was poor and ham-fisted. Bad men are cartoonishly bad. The main characters are unlikeable, selfish, and kind of dumb, but the book lamely tries to tell you they are righteous and clever. The magical competition rules were vague and seemed to change on a whim, which disrupts the tension and narrative flow. The game was also repetitive, it's just the same game every round with some brief unimaginative challenges thrown in. 

Aside from my complaints, I think there's some potential here, but it's at a disadvantage with a plot that feels derivative of other books in the YA Competition genre. It needed some strong characters and solid prose to carry the unoriginal premise, and I don't think it had either. 

I would recommend this book to fans of What the River Knows because that book left me feeling a similar level of disappointment, frustration, and bafflement that so many people liked it.

It was nice that the audiobook had two narrators to help tell the protagonists apart. One of the audiobook narrators (for Mayté) was decent, but I really disliked the one for Lo.