This was a fun literary trip back to Brazil through American eyes. It was a little too breezy for my taste - the two-to-three-pages-per-chapter structure lends itself a little too conveniently to occasional moments of false epiphany that don't quite add up to their promise of meaningfulness at the end - but perfect as a plane read on a 10-hour flight where my attention was already pretty limited to begin with and I needed the instant gratification. 
 I'm docking it a few stars mainly for the fact that it left me wanting to see way more of Rio: the beaches (how can you set a novel in Rio and never take anybody to the beach? how??), the acai bars, the lagoon, Escadaria Selaron... it was frustrating to have the action taking place in such a ridiculously magical, fun city but never really getting to see much more of it than a few generic hotel rooms and cafes (with a couple day-trips to random far-flung islands that aren't much more memorable). Other details (the food, the heat, even those stupid waxy napkins) were spot on, but there was a weird lack of landscape and place for a novel that feels like it should be rooted in it. 
 There's a moment where the main character, an American translator of Portuguese, relishes in the fact that she never tells her boring American boyfriend about her trips to Brazil, and thus gets to savor the memories more deeply than if she'd had to force them into a handful of digestible anecdotes. I sense the author grappling with the same tension in the settings of her novel, trying to avoid drawing too much on the distinctive, flashy aspects of the city to find the more ambiguous or universal elements - but I find the absence of those real touch-stones dissatisfying, and I'm not sure how or why it serves her story.