Down the Rabbit Hole

Everything went very well and how nice to find that the former owner listed the characters and who each one was inside the cover. I wish she would have had a little clearer writing, but it will help in reading the book.

Sad look in to the life of children in harsh conditions. The material was light but poignant in my view.

This author used the wonderful perspective of a boy stuck in his disfunctional environment. A quick read with many layers of meaning.

I cannot believe this has as high of a rating as it does. I thought this was a total waste of my time. This is not a novel but a short story. The story is sick and sad at the same time. I would never recommend this story to anyone.

I was looking for a quick short novel to read. This one sufficed perfectly. Great little book.

A short but beautifully written little novel through the eyes of a young boy.

It was a good quick read with an ending kinda whisking there was more to the story. None the less still a good read.

This is a very well written book with a novel perspective on the drug world. The child's perspective gives some insight into what it must be like growing up in a drug lords home.

History in a rough life imaginative story

A great read! Read it aloud to someone for full effect.

Down The Rabbit Hole is a short, sharp tribute to Alice in Wonderland, translating the story to the heavily fortified palace of Yolcaut, a Mexican drug lord. The story is told by Yolcaut's seven year old son, Tochtli, who may or may not be precocious. He has certainly been inducted early into the world of adults. His father sees him as part of the gang and has done nothing to shield Tochtli from the violence and threats that are part of the drug lord's daily existence. But for all the wealth, Tchtli is unhappy. He has no friends of his own age; he is privately tutored and only occasionally leaves the palace.Tochtli is on his was to becoming a little emperor. Most adults do what he tells them, simply because they are afraid of Yolcaut. This gives Tochtli power that he doesn't have the maturity to understand. He is unable to see the damage he does to himself as he indulges his every whim; and nor does he see the damage he inflicts on others. He obsesses about the mechanics of killing - the number of bullets required in a particular location to turn a person into a corpse; or the semantic difference between a corpse and human remains; but he makes no real link to the permanence or impact of death. He also has a fascination with hats.Half way through the novella, Tochtli decides he wants Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. He asks his father's staff to get him one and, because none can be found in Mexico, they all hare off to Monrovia to try to catch one. The grotesqueness of Tochtli's confined world in Mexico is swapped for a vast, wide open space in Liberia where the scale of everything is wrong. The hippos are small; the child is bossing the adults; the distribution of wealth is wonky.There are frequent references back to Alice in Wonderland, not least in the notes at the end that explain that the weirdly named characters all carry the names of animals in the Nahuatl language. The whole piece is a kind of mad hatter's tea party but without any obvious Alice character to ground anything in reality.The novella is short, it ends somewhat abruptly and some of the symbolism of the character names would be overlooked until the reader gets to the end pages. One presumes this is intentional since only a minority of Villalobos's intended readers in Mexico would understand Nahuatl. The novella is intriguing but is possibly too short and too matter of fact to allow the reader to really get stuck into it. Perhaps the answer is to read it again when some initially hidden details have become known and see whether Tochtli still seems quite so naive.

I really can't understand why this brilliant little jewel of a book hasn't had only five star reviews. Rabbit Hole is a very quick read, almost a novella rather than a novel, and the prose is lean, perfect, dry and funny. Villalobos doesn't need to plump it up or say any more than he does. The book is narrated by Tochtli, the child of a drug baron. He is a protagonist that I both pitied and disliked. This in itself is a brave artistic choice for an author to make: not to be sentimental just because it's a child. Tochtli ostensibly has everything he could want, everything that is apart from empathetic love and guidance. His father is incredibly wealthy and powerful. He is also paranoid, indulgent and a psycho. This kid has no boundaries at all. He thinks he has everything though he's too smart to be entirely fooled by that. The reader is fully aware that Tochtli is a prisoner in his gilded cage. He might want to believe he is being kept safe in the fortress that is father's house but we can see that any chance he might have to flourish is being relentlessly poisoned by his environment. The pygmy hippopotamus is a choice comic symbol. Taken out of its proper environment such a creature can only be destroyed and its inevitable demise is symbolic for what Tochtli's father will bring upon his son.

Narrated from the perspective of a child, this short story reads as a frantic diary excerpt.It documents the sad and brutal, yet unknowing loss of childhood. This lack of awareness from the child's perspective lends frequent humour to the choice of language, its context and how events are interpreted.Innocence affords the reader regular opportunity to identify with the child's misplaced view of the world, but ultimately a sense of hopelessness pervades his life.There are other conventional themes that go with the territory of a narco-novel: mindless violence, the drug lord father’s inability to engage with his son emotionally and to compensate with absurd gifts, the subsequent and elaborate psychological destruction of his child, misogyny, conflict between the political state and drug cartel and betrayal.Convincingly and experimentally written, I would recommend this read for a fleeting literary high.