It is a novel of dazzling confinement, where sight is the main character: his sister, his aunt, his nanny all play their own game while allowing Mateo to keep his hope for identity in plotting his own escape.
Once again, the visual experience of a child, this time a girl, builds the world of grownups and family, unveiling all the brutality and meanness of adults as seen with her ingenuousness.
This was the first book where Rosero involved other themes from Colombia's tragical reality such as kidnapping, presented here as a permanent threat that in the end justifies Juliana's own confinement.
The novel tells the stories of a group of teenagers from a famous school in Bogotá, Colegio Agustiniano Norte, denouncing the education taught by the priest headmasters as "fool, arcaic, troglodite and morbid".
In 2006 he won Colombia's Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize) awarded in recognition of a life in letters by the Ministry of Culture.
The fighting intensifies from all sides, and while the citizens of San José decide to run away and join the hordes of displaced peasants of Colombia, Ismael chooses to stay in the blasted and ghost township.