This is a pretty well written dystopian novel, Trías's writing on the setting and the atmosphere is mesmerising. Not my favourite topic but I would still recommend to people who are looking for this style.

3.5⭐️

After loving The Rooftop by the author, I had really high hopes for Pink Slime, and although I did enjoy it, it didn’t wow me and I’m gutted that it wasn’t a 5⭐️ read for me.

I read Severance by Ling Ma earlier this year and since then I’ve read a few more dystopian novels and they all feel too similar.

On a more positive note, Fernanda Trias is an absolute master of her craft at making a reader feel anxious, claustrophobic, isolated, and doomed. There is very little plot, but definitely an incredibly well created atmosphere.

The speculative fiction coming out of Latin America is doing so many interesting things with overdone themes in western fiction, and this was such a breath of fresh air for being a contagion narrative. Excellent characterisation and I felt myself being emotionally attached to the characters.

Also - an excellent translation. So seamless and almost lyrical

Pink Slime is a chilling and eerie dystopia, gorgeously written and incredibly thought-provoking. The unnamed protagonist is relatable and I truly felt invested in their story. In the midst of a worldwide ecological crisis, she struggles to escape the bindings of her dysfuctional relationships, whilst being unexpectedly burdened with the full time care of a sick young boy when his mother fails to collect him from her custody.

Pink Slime refers to the mass-produced processed meat paste that consists a significant portion of the average person's diet. This disgusting foodstuff coupled with the terrifying depiction of disastrous algal blooms overwhelming the water sources, the climate change and deadly winds that cause an unnamed and devastating sickness. This was a stunning translation and I highly recommend to lovers of literary fiction, particularly with dystopian themes.

This was recommended to me everywhere, and I really enjoyed it. It's a speedy read - I sped through it in an afternoon - but Trías builds an entire world around the ecological disaster she presents here. If you like a Station Eleven -style dystopia, this'll be one for you.

Atmospheric and beautifully written. The translation was excellent. It is a timely dystopian novel, with startling echoes of the pandemic, though written beforehand. The poetic writing is absorbing, Although the story is bleak, it is a perfect book to hunker down with over a weekend - then take yourself out for a walk in the fresh air, meet with friends and be very thankful.

I normally shy away from dystopian novels, I find them to be bland and repetitive on the whole, but I was completely drawn in by Trias' novel despite its unexplained natural phenomena/creeping illness dystopic setting. Perhaps it is because it is unexplained. Trias is not interested in the grand scope of the whole world, we barely know what is happening outside our unnamed main character's home town, and she is equally unconcerned with finding a why for what is happening. We are instead focused in the mundane, our protagonists relationship with her rubber band ex husband as he manipulates and she is inert, with her prickly mother who contains the same narcissim and sharp tongue, and with the little boy she looks after, another unresponsive person in her life with syndrome that makes him unable to stop eating. It is a book of stillness, and waiting, of repetition and a loss so mundane you hardly notice it. It feels like depression, our main character responding to nothing and with no onward momentum. It reminded me much of the stillness in the pandemic lockdowns and as our character ruminates inwardly instead of panics outwardly the claustrophobia was high. Really lovely translation too, I don't read Spanish but the atmosphere and the sentence structures were really well done.

Pink Slime is one of those books that doesn't come around often anymore. It's dystopian fiction at its best.

An unnamed woman is trapped in a port city after the area becomes contaminated by an acid-like red algae in the water. When the 'red wind' blows, it picks up the algae and spreads it through town. Those caught out in it are doomed to suffer acid-like burns that almost always lead to death. When the wind eases and it’s safe to go outside, the city is engulfed in a relentless fog.

But this isn’t really a horror novel. Instead, the red algae and the danger it poses serve as a haunting backdrop to explore the complexities of human relationships and the protagonist's internal conflicts. She spends her time travelling between her arrogant ex-husband, stuck in a clinic after exposure to the wind, and her neglectful and cruel mother who has started to live in an abandoned mansion in the once-wealthy part of town. All while looking after the disabled child of wealthy out-of-towners who is tormented by an insatiable hunger. She has enough wealth to leave for safety, but what's stopping her? Why can’t she leave?

Flashbacks to her past life are scattered throughout the book and weave together her seemingly immovable situation. The writing is sparse, suffocating, and claustrophobic. There are moments of foreshadowing that left me unable to put the book down. This raw, emotional intensity left me completely numb.

It’s unforgettable.

Thank you to Net Galley and Scribe UK for this digital advanced copy. My review is my own honest opinion.

The book follows a young woman (in her 30s?) living in a coastal town in an unnamed country, on the cusp of environmental and social collapse. She struggles with hope, and tries to navigate worrying a mother, with whom she has a love-hate relationship, an ex husband, whom she still loves but struggles to understand and deal with him emotional states, and a young boy that has been put in her care, suffering from a syndrome that makes him always hungry.

Despite the title and the various synopses I read, the book is essentially about the young woman and the loss of hope in a world that is becoming increasingly alien and devoid of love and humanity. It is a story of a woman's gradual mental collapse in the face of insurmountable circumstances.

With this being the central theme, the author then piles on a bunch of pet issues, all of which are valid, but result in a mishmash of topics, which I personally struggle with. There is the central topic of meat and the pink slime it is turned to. The critique of the meat processing industry, and its effects on the environment and human beings, is perhaps the most dominant theme. I could see the story of the child as being a metaphor for the insatiable hunger of humanity for everything and especially meat. Then there is environment collapse, effects of migration, mental disease and suicide, political intrigue and incompetence to name but a few. Again, all are valid, but taken together it feels undercooked.

The writing style is fine, but nothing to write home about frankly. The pacing is ok, the language is ok, etc etc. But nothing really special.

Overall, I would recommend this book to those who are interested in reading about the issues above from the perspective of a South American author. That being said, this is a pretty bad reason to recommend a book. If it were written by a British man, it would never see the light of day, most likely.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

At just over 200 pages this can easily be read of an afternoon and/or bring you out of a reading slump.

The novel is written from the POV of a woman who remains in her home town following an ecological crisis. There is toxic algae in the water and the residents shelter themselves from an intermittant 'red wind' that can peel skin to the muscle.

Small and mighty. I enjoyed the themes of loneliness, isolation and fear as well as the the narrators reflections on relationships with others. I really liked how it centred in on these relationships, life choices, and how we treat each other, as I think most of us would in such an event.

I found the narrators relationship with her mother particularly moving and, if you're anything like me, there will be multiple times that you'll want to underline or comment against the text.

Huge thanks to @netgalley and @scribe_uk for sharing a copy with me.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review!

4.25 stars

If you were a fan of more understated dystopian fiction novels like Severance by Ling Ma and Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, you’ll definitely want to look out for Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías when it hits UK shelves on 10th August!

Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary in absolutely gorgeous, seamless prose, this muted piece of Uruguayan fiction had me gripped despite its distinct lack of plot. The atmosphere Trías creates is exactly what I want from disaster fiction - fuelled by unease, unsettling in the fact that it’s so believable. This was originally published in 2020, and I think Trías wrote the bulk of it before the pandemic hit, but it ends up drawing eerie parallels between the real life catastrophe unfolding.

The ecological disaster in Pink Slime is unnamed, but people must stay inside when the siren sounds as that means the ‘red wind’ is coming - a grisly phenomenon which strips the skin from anyone caught in it. The unnamed narrator adjusts to this new life in her coastal town, slowly emptying as more well off inhabitants flee inland. She remains behind, caring for a boy with an unnamed disorder (which makes him insatiably hungry), paid well by his upper class parents. The critique of how global events affect people who have money differently isn’t in your face but it’s impossible to miss.

I loved the claustrophobic effect of seeing a large-scale disaster unfold through the lens of just one woman. Her everyday worries over the boy in her charge, her mother (whose behaviour grows ever more erratic) and her ex-husband who is in hospital inflicted with the disease but somehow not dead (admittedly this was the only part that left me scratching my head a bit, it didn’t feel fully explored) remain, even as she navigates the increasingly hostile new landscape of her city.

I know lots of us might not yet feel comfortable engaging with pandemic fiction, but I highly recommend this unsettling little gem!

This was an amazing and haunting novel which was set in a small seaside town. It sounds all cute and wonderful and get the town has been ravaged by this skin disease which has came from the sea, and it’s caused this red wind to blow through the town and if you get caught in this wind then you get this skin disease which causes you a slow and painful death. The main character goes and visits her ex husband and her mother who live by themselves who she helps take care of, as well as looking after this young boy who has an eating disorder where he binges his food and feels like he doesn’t eat enough. His real parents don’t want to look after him so our protagonist is paid to look after him.
This book is about claustrophobia and being cut off from the world. It’s a slow book but it just makes you think about life and what it would be like being cut off from the world with this deadly disease that no one knows how to cure or what it even is. We just watch the mental health of our protagonist slowly decline and become more secluded on herself.

Description:
Red slime is killing almost everything in the sea, and all the birds have left. Disruption to the food chain leaves folks dependent on a super-factory for their meat products, the titular pink slime. The protagonist ekes out a life in a port town long since abandoned by almost anyone who could afford to, tied to her ailing ex-husband, stubborn mother, and a child she's paid to nanny, who has a syndrome which leaves him constantly, insatiably hungry.

Liked:
There's a lot going on here. The dystopian themes are backgrounded and serve mainly to enhance the atmosphere of dread and claustrophobia, whilst the protagonist's relationships and everyday actions are foregrounded. Her relationship with her mother and the child she cares for are intriguing and satisfyingly... crisp, or starched, in a way that reminds me of Tove Jansson. The atmosphere is well-sketched and the imagery juicy, if disturbing.

Disliked:
I see this as a short book trying to do a bit too much. I'm sure there's something in the relationship of the protagonist and her husband which is very personal to the author and which feels like it absolutely needs to be explored, but I don't think it was managed, here. We're told that there's an elastic pull, keeping her coming back to him, but we see a lot of their past together, and I still can't fathom any real reason why. He just sounds like an asshole, a complete pain to be around. I'm quite sure that I must be missing the point spectacularly, but I think the book would have been better without him in it at all.

Would Recommend. The cover looks beautiful, too, although it didn’t come through in the Kindle PDF, unfortunately!

Oh absolutely yes. I had a good feeling about this book and Fernanda Trías has not disappointed me. After reading The Rooftop this month I was even more excited to read this because I felt like Trías was really good at evoking strange and claustrophobic atmospheres and that is exactly what she does here but on a much larger scale.

Pink Slime is about a town where a strange plague has emerged from infected algae in the water, and the “red wind” it brings causes people to contact a horrible skin disease and die a slow and painful death. The narrator is living in an apartment all by herself, surrounded by the fog brought on by the change in climate and visiting her ex husband who is sick and in one of the chronic care units. She is also looking after a boy for a rich family who for some reason don’t want to look after him themselves (kind of reminded me of Still Born at these parts) and visiting her increasingly spiralling mother who lives across town.

This is a very slow moving book where nothing much happens but I was absolutely sucked into it and I felt as though I couldn’t stop reading. It’s not a book where you get answers but like The Rooftop it explores the idea of paranoia, claustrophobia and being cut off from the outside world. I felt like the translation by Heather Cleary is one of the reasons I loved this so much as she has also translated Brenda Lozano, and a lot of the writing felt similar.

I cannot wait to see what Trías has to show us next as I’m so intrigued by how her brain works and what she has to say about loneliness and the human condition when it’s left to descend into depravity. Another real triumph for Latin American horror.