Review: Perfect Days

Perfect Days by Raphael Montes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Now who doesn't love a happy ending?! Well, me for starters. Nothing disappoints my sadistic little heart more than a cutesy, this-would-never-happen-in-real-life-everything-falls-perfectly-into-place finale. PUKE EMOJI! (obscure reference to an irrelevant iPhone commercial that YouTube TV forces down my throat every 4.5 minutes).

But wait- this chipper little story actually doesn't give you the warm and fuzzies when you reach the aforementioned "happy ending", you say? It in fact slaps you in the face with something so absolutely f*cking disgusting and seriously warped that only Normal Bates' mother (aka Norman Bates - if you haven't seen Psycho, you're at least aware of the pLoT tWiSt!! so no apologies for the spoiler) could love it? Yes, yes and more yes. Give me all the disturbing and borderline offensive debauchery contained within the walls of this novel all day long. And please, for good measure, wrap it up in festive paper and present it to me under the tree on Christmas morning, with a fancy bow on top of course, as a modern day South American love story.

I wasn't phased as I breezed through the pages of this novel, but I suppose I can see why the more sensitive, and possibly more politically correct, variety of our species would be. I personally found it creative and fresh and exciting to tag along as our charmingly insane main character drugged our unsuspecting spitfire of a female lead into oblivion, neatly folded her into her own pretty pink Samsonite suitcase (which the Author's Note at the end of this novel confirms you CAN do - he's tried and succeeded apparently?) and trafficked her across borderlines like a kilo of Escobar's finest cocaine. I felt his undying devotion as he held her hostage for months and subjected her to inconsistent and inhumane torture, only to eventually decide he needed to sever her spinal cord with the precision of the gifted medical student he was, plunging her into a debilitating world of paraplegia, purely to ensure her lifelong dependence on him, and in turn, a guarantee of life together forever. It was quite beautiful and unapologetically poetic, honestly. These jewelry companies need take note - "Every Kiss Begins with Kay"? Shit's lame. More like "Every Lifetime of Togetherness Begins with Kidnapping Your Woman and Having No Feeling from the Waist Down".

But, it appear this kind of untraditional love story, and accompanying "happy" ending, only works when your name is Joe Goldburg....

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