Let's break The Diablo's Curse

 

I am once again talking about a book that I bought at Gay’s the Word from London. Love her. I will be returning again. But I’m talking about The Diablo’s Curse by Gabe Cole Novoa. I have recollection that I bought this book specifically because I wanted something that wasn’t just romance, and was like, “Well, yes! Let’s read a different genre”, that’s it.

The blurbiana Grande says that Dami is a demon determined to cancel every deal they’ve ever made. It’s the only way to tether their soul to earth and become human again. There’s just one person standing in their way. Silas. An irresistibly cute boy cursed to die young – except for the deal with Dami that is keeping him alive. If he cancels the deal, Silas is dead. Unless… they can end the curse that has plagued Silas’s family for generations. Together, Dami and Silas make their way to a dangerous island of the New England coast. If they can find the treasure hidden there and return it to the place where famous pirate Captain Kidd is buried, Silas’s curse will be broken and Dami will be free. That is, if the island doesn’t kill them first…

We open on a prologue wherein el Diablo strikes a deal with a woman to take her firstborn in exchange for love. This baby ends up being Dami, raised by the devil, who is living their life newly as a human, or have been for a few months, and el Diablo is dead, but they keep seeing the devil everywhere. However, Dami is losing the ability to taste things because, plot twist, they’re part demon essentially and they need to cancel all their deals in order to remain human within a year of first becoming human. The two of them end on this journey to find the aforementioned treasure and get washed up on the island that this girl, Eve, who lives there seems to run. Eve does also mention that they’re not the first people to come looking for the treasure – there are also a bunch of other people on the island that ended up there in one way or another. All these other people are the survivors of people who have been looking for the treasure, and the people who died went in all kinds of ways: infection, falling off cliffs, poisoned, killed by creatures.

The POV flits between Dami and Silas and you don’t always immediately know who you’re with. You can usually tell fairly quickly, if not within the first paragraph or so, which was fine. I definitely think that Dami’s existence was more interesting than Silas’s. That does sound horrible to say, but Silas was simply cursed with very bad luck and also caught in a deal unable to die – a wild thing to say – but he was still human at the end of the day, so he worked exactly how you’d expect him to work, only he couldn’t die. But now that I’ve said that, since you do see him die a few different ways (drowning, poisoning), I wonder how it would be if I died in a way that he couldn’t have come back from. Say some way like he got decapitated or crushed under something. Because normally, he’d die, the characters around him would have just left him for him to come to. But what if his head had been chopped off? Would he come back to life as different parts just to immediately die again or something? And if he got crushed, say, under a big boulder or something and people were unable to retrieve his body, would his dead body have just stayed there until something happened? Imagine if his skin decayed while he was dead, would he then come back normal, or decayed? Many questions, all of which stemmed from me saying he wasn’t as interesting a POV as Dami.

Anyway, Dami was desperate to become human throughout the book. That’s it. Imagine that being the entire point. But their goal has them slowly revert into a Demonio throughout the book from being, not so much human, but close to human. In this, they were used to living like a human, but with the powers of a Demonio, as you see in the start of the book, they’ve assumed the form of this rich boy and are just blowing through his money, living life deliciously, until they start losing the ability to taste, to smell, to feel. And I liked that what it was to be human was all of the little things in life. It was the taste of buttered bread, the smell of a sea breeze or a grody bar. Mind you this was also set in 1812 America, so I imagine the whole place would have stunk, if you ignore the magical island.

I almost wish there was a fourth person in the group. The main characters are Dami, Silas, and then they pick up this girl, Marisol, on the island, and they’re the three that end up together. Not in a polyamory kind of way, but just in an explorer group kind of way. And because the feelings and the relationship set up between Dami and Silas were so blatantly just there that just left Marisol as the third wheel to them. Marisol as a character I feel like I have no major feelings towards. To me, she was so just there. I suppose you could say that she acted as the bridge between Dami and Silas, figuratively she literally was that when the conflict between the two inevitably rose up, so I understand why there was only three of them, but I think that additional character might have made her more present in the group to me.

Speaking of the relationship between Dami and Silas. There’s the trope of enemies to, I don’t know that I’d fully say lovers but, kind-of-lovers-I-guess. The book doesn’t so obviously define their relationship, but they kiss a few times throughout the book. It’s not like a romance book where the whole goal of the book is for the leads to get together, since I think the whole Dami losing all of their senses kind of put a dampener on the whole thing for them. There is one point where they kiss in Dami’s POV and you see that since Dami is losing connection to being human, they don’t feel anything when it happens. And don’t get me wrong, the book definitely was billed as a story of the two of them trying to break Silas’s curse, so he doesn’t have eternal bad luck, but I think that ended up taking over what romance there was in the book. Since they beef so hard in the beginning, you absolutely do see their relationship and the dynamic change – a dynamic I loved, since Dami was such a little shit – as they get to know each other.

I think my only issue was that, and I don’t know what it was but, I just never connected with this book. The book never did anything wrong, let me say that. I liked what I was reading, never finding myself bored or anything, but I just didn’t really connect to it, you know? I definitely smiled while I was reading during certain parts and reacted. It has just been one of those books that I can say, “That was good, I’ve read. But I don’t think I need to go back to it.” And I feel like I want to reiterate: the book never did anything wrong for me. I just didn’t connect with it. And that’s simply an issue when it comes to something subjective like books and art.

Okay, bye.