El Camino del Infierno by R. Rodriguez, the first in the Lagrimas del Corazón series, is a dark romantasy that has been on my TBR for a while. Thanks to social media marketing, I was intrigued by the characters and the premise, but had no idea what I was in for.
When Matteo, a descendant of the God of Death, meets a human bartender, he’s determined to find a way to be with her, even though she’s mortal and it’s entirely forbidden.
Athena has not been lucky in love, but Matteo is something different. She can’t help but fall for him, even though she senses something dark about him.
In a tale of forbidden love, ancient gods, and tragic danger, an unlikely duo has to fight near-unbeatable odds to protect their love.
I wanted so badly to like El Camino del Infierno. The premise was fascinating, and it’s a departure from the Eurocentric romantasies that dominate the market. But this book is almost unreadable.
The relationship between Matteo and Athena moves unbelievably fast, with no grounding whatsoever. It feels like the story is skipping steps. They meet twice, and she’s willing to accept that he’s the descendant of a death god and move in with him, with no questions asked and no acknowledgement of how crazy that is.
Unfortunately, that’s only one of the issues here. This book is in desperate need of editing. There are sentences that make absolutely no sense, and grammatical errors are everywhere.
The dialogue is stilted, and almost every interaction feels unnatural. I don’t normally like to go this hard about editing mistakes, but for the love of all that is holy, I’ve written drunk texts with better editing than this book. It reads like a very rough first draft, and the numerous problems render El Camino del Infierno almost unreadable.
Halfway through the book, the climax has already occurred, and the rest is just denouement and spice. The spice is fine, definitely the best part of this book, but let me be clear, that’s not saying much. It’s average at best.
El Camino del Infierno has a premise that I loved, and interesting parts of the story, but so much more work needs to go into this book to make it ready for readers. This is just straight-up bad writing, and maybe it could have been fixed with numerous editing passes, but as it stands, it’s atrocious. At least we know ChatGPT had nothing to do with this.
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