Eileen Battersby, writing for The Guardian, said "Monge balances the dour, apocalyptic brutality of Cormac McCarthy with lively, grim humour – evident in the exasperated exchanges – all of which makes the stark truths driving this flamboyant narrative a little easier to swallow".

[1] The two main characters, Estela and Epitafio ("about the weirdest variation of Romeo and Juliet yet to emerge anywhere"[1]), are former orphans who engage in human trafficking, gathering (and brutalizing) people who have fled their countries to sell them.

[3] Lily Meyer, who reviewed the book for NPR, commented on the stylistic choices and their structural importance: Monge borrows Dante's language to describe Estela and Epitafio's nameless victims, and uses the real-life testimonies to give his fictional migrants a voice.

[3] Hahn says those quotes are "destabilising" and mark the existence of "the timeless, nameless, undifferentiated creatures in the trucks", and praises the novel for "the acrobatic leaps in register, between richly poetic and spat-out visceral expletive, somehow remaining all of a piece".

[4] In addition, Hahn remarks on the narrative technique, which can move from one place and plot line to another with great speed: "The jumps between strands of the story often happen mid-sentence, a neat trick that just adds to the pull this book exerts on its readers".

But reserving "beautiful prose for the disenfranchised" also entails a risk – the "gamble" pays off, she says, but "it might have distracted him from his moral questions a bit too much... Why should we care about Estela and Epitafio's love story?