Climbing Mount TBR: The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica

Review by Ed O.

Welcome back to Climbing Mount TBR where I, your humble Book Kaiju, struggle to climb to the top of my “to read” pile one book at a time. This time we’re looking at The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica with Sarah Moses as the translator. I want to give a shout out to the publisher who graciously gave an eARC to Kaiju & Gnome for an honest review… And boy, am I going to be honest.

So, what is The Unworthy?

After some cataclysm the world is dying. There’s poison in the air, water causes insanity, food is scarce, disease is rampant, and let’s not forget all the people. People are the worst!

We are reading the diary of an unnamed woman who is a member of the Sacred Sisterhood. What’s that? Think S&M nuns, but not in the fun way. More in the “torture and mutilate ourselves to become more pure” way. How do they mutilate themselves? Examples include: Blinding themselves so they can hear ants. Cutting out their tongues for… reasons. Deafening themselves so they can see things that aren’t there.

Our narrator wants to become one of these select holy women, except maybe she doesn’t. It’s complicated. But since she’s got nowhere else to go, the rest of the world is a devastated hellscape (maybe), she’s stuck with the nuns. It’s not all bad though, she gets all the crickets she can eat, can bully and torture the servants, and when there’s a funeral, they get to drink coffee!

Life kind of sucks, but then a mysterious lady shows up who will change everything. And by that, I mean, show them that maybe being tortured and torturing others in turn isn’t the best way to live your life. Perhaps, instead, they could use the greatest power of all… Love Getting the heck out of there and running away.

What did I think?

I wanted so badly to like this book. It’s religious horror! That’s my horror genre of choice! It’s feminist horror with a message! I agree with everything that it has to say. There’s nothing it has to say about toxic masculinity, environmentalism, societal mistreatment of women, and the role of religion in all of it that I disagree with. I’m fully on board with the message. Preach it from the mountain tops!

So why didn’t I like it? Why do I just find myself slamming my head like a Monty Pythonian Monk with every page I read?

Maybe it’s because of the writing style. This is written as a diary of a woman in an oppressive convent that tortures anyone that steps out of line. She was orphaned at a young age, lived as a borderline feral child for a while, and now must strap her loose diary pages to her chest to hide them. So why does she write like she’s an accomplished modernist? Why does her prose use tricks and styles that are poetic to the point of being pretentious?

It just doesn’t make sense. The language of the story doesn’t match the substance. All I can think of when I’m reading it is the disconnect between what’s on the page and what is supposed to be in the page. The appeal of a story told via letters and diaries is you get a feel for the characters. You get to see the world as they see or, more importantly, as they remember it. The Unworthy’s prose instead feels like you’re just reading what the author wrote. There’s not a character to inhabit, just an author telling you vaguely what’s happening.

Plus, this book does nothing new. At first glance the world feels interesting. Butterflies cause burns where they land? Water causes madness when it’s drunk straight from the stream? The vague hints at the world outside the wall? What the heck is an “artificial tree?” The mystery is intriguing and fascinating, but as the story unfolds the answers are just the normal dystopia causing catastrophes.

The climate crisis has reached a point that the world was devastated in the water wars, just like in Mad Max. Then the polar ice caps melted and caused flooding ala Water World. Then there’s disease like in The Stand. The main character gets with a group of feral kids ala Beyond Thunderdome. Then she joins a religious order that hearkens to The Handmaid’s Tale while its isolation harkens to every single dystopian novel that involves some bunker like Wool.

It's a rather paint-by-numbers dystopian. It’s so cliché that the big reveals that are supposed to make the reader go “OMG!” were easily figured out around a quarter of the way through the book. I didn’t realize what was supposed to be the “Big Reveal” until I finished the novel and looked back over my notes. Not because the reveal was overly subtle, but because I thought it was so obvious that it couldn’t be the big mystery.

Plus, I was not expecting a character like Lucia. I can’t help but think of Lucia as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Do you know what a MPDG is? It’s a character archetype found in a lot of nerdy movies from the late 90s through the 2010s. A MPDG is a character that comes in and disrupts the main character's normal life because they are so wacky and have an “I do what I want” attitude.

And that’s what Lucia does. She comes in, has a relationship with the lead, and throws the lead’s life askew. She uses some tricks to subvert the authority of the theocracy. She becomes super popular, while still being the mysterious/dangerous outsider. She inspires the lead to do the right thing.

I’m not going to dwell on this book much longer. It wasn’t for me. Like I said, I wanted to like this book. I liked the themes and the message. I loved the premise. This book should have been my jam, but it wasn’t. Maybe it will be yours, but honestly just go read The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

But hey, that’s just my opinion. Let us know what you think over on Bluesky @kaijuandgnome.bsky.social‬!