“Jorge Armenteros‘s The Roar of the River isn’t a tale of suspense so much as it is a book whose pages crackle with myriad frictions. These characters may resemble the phantasmata—simultaneously posing and maneuvered—familiarly associated with the chanson de geste’s medieval dreamlands, yet they are anything but benighted victims of fate. Rather, like the personifications that relieve the flatness of the fable’s total ethics, these figures struggle against all that is archetypal about them. Is it possible to survive a world bent on othering the most humane aspects of our humanity? Quest or riddle, Armenteros understands that, nowadays, indomitables like these fall (if they fall at all) to those willing to scratch out and scratch away.”

—Joe Milazzo, author of Crepuscule w/ Nellie and The Habiliments

 

— Joe Milazzo