After feeling very out of the loop for the last few years on most of the books that got nominated for awards, I have decided that 2024 is my year of reading stuff being currently published. While I will no doubt get sidetracked by shiny baubles from the past, I am going to be completing a bingo card with books solely written in 2024.
The Bullet Swallower caught my eye because I’ve been looking to get more into Fantasy Westerns (American Hippo and Make Me No Grave have both caught my eye), and this book not only dovetailed nicely with my plans to read new releases, but also looked like just the type of story I’d enjoy.
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This book is good for readers who like morally grey characters, family sagas, characters across decades, heaps of bravado, magical realism
Elevator Pitch: The Bullet Swallower primarily follows the bandit Antonio Sonoro, the descendent of a long line of tyrants and despots. He’s chasing after the score to end all scores, but quickly ends up trapped in a cycle of survival, hunting, and being hunted. Seventy years later, Jaime Sonoro, a movie star, is gifted a book chronicling his family’s cruel history. And lingering it all is Remedio, a being who knows the men are damned, and can do nothing to escape the twisted fate of the Sonoros.
What Worked for Me
I thought that this book was extraordinarily successful in blending elements of Magical Realism with Westerns. It definitely leans more into the Western side of things, with big swaths of the story having almost no fantastic events at all. But it never vanishes entirely, and Remedio’s presence lingers over the story like a shadow. Even the focus on telling the story of a family over generations calls back to books like One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It helps that the writing in this book is a tremendous plus. It finds a nice balance between brutally readable and waxing poetic. It was simple enough prose for me to follow along with the audiobook (the narrator did an excellent job) but had enough skill to build a really engaging portrait of two fascinating men. The Sonoro family really captured my attention. The author didn’t shy away from the brutality of life on the run. While there were moments of what one might expect following a bandit, there were also many that involved days of trudging through the drought-stricken countryside of Mexico and Texas, or grappling with the life left behind.
I also really appreciated that this book centered the dynamics between Mexican citizens and Americans (especially law enforcement), including how that line gets blurrier and blurrier the more often Texas territory changed hands. It really succeeded as a historical fantasy novel in that respect as well, and isn’t something I’ve seen from my (admittedly quite limited) exposure to westerns.
What Didn’t Work for Me
This was less a downside for me, but more an acknowledgement that for some, the lead bandit of the story is not going to be a fun character to read. He’s not particularly nice. And even if he is often acting out of a desire for revenge, or due to being framed for crimes he doesn’t actually commit, he’s not particularly ‘likable’ and isn’t someone you’d likely want to spend much time with in real life. He is still a bandit after all.
TL:DR: The Bullet Swallower is a great read for those who think a magical realism book about a bandit sounds like a good time.
Bingo Squares: Criminals (HM), Bards, Multi-POV, Author of Color, Set in a Small Town (HM). I’ll be honest it’s been a few days and I can’t recall if the book featured dreams.
I plan on using this for Criminals, I think.
Previous Reviews for this Card
Welcome to Forever - a psychedelic roller coaster of edited and fragmented memories of a dead ex-husband
Infinity Alchemist - a dark academia/romantasy hybrid with refreshing depictions of various queer identities
Someone You Can Build a Nest In - a cozy/horroromantasy mashup about a shapeshifting monster surviving being hunted and navigating first love
Cascade Failure - a firefly-esque space adventure with a focus on character relationships and found family
The Fox Wife - a quiet and reflective historical fantasy involving a fox trickster and an investigator in early-1900s China
Indian Burial Ground - a horror book focusing on Native American folklore and social issues

Were the 2023 and 2024 Eurovision Song Contest competitions fixed? I know that question is going to immediately cause people to think that I’m saying there was something illegal going on, and that is not what I’m saying. I’m not accusing anyone of anything illegal. The competitions in 2023 and 2024 were fixed in a way that was completely legal, and maybe not even in violation of Eurovision Song Contest rules. And that’s the problem. I’m going to explain how it was fixed, using a data-driven analysis, and I’m confident that after you finish reading this, you will be convinced as well.
Here, in a nutshell, is what happened. Several of the individual juries representing the different countries colluded with each other to award their 12 points to an agreed-upon performer. In 2023, it was Loreen, representing Sweden, and in 2024, it was Nemo, representing Switzerland. By doing so, the juries ensured that no matter what happened with the fans’ vote, it would be the juries’ votes that determined the winner of Eurovision. In order to know why the juries would have done this, it’s necessary to understand the changes to Eurovision voting rules that were implemented starting in 2016.
The voting rules have always been in a state of flux, but in 2016, there was a major change to the rules that completely altered the balance of power between the voting fans and the international juries. Prior to 2016, the points allocated by a country (From 12, to 10, and then down to 1) were based 50-50 on the juries’ votes, and that country’s popular votes.
That changed in 2016. Instead of each country getting one set of votes, they now got two. A country’s jury got to award its set of points (12, 10, 9, 8, etc) and the country’s fans go to award their own set using the same point formula.
Fan votes, across the different nations, tended to be more uniform than that of the judges. As a result, the fan vote had the effect of all but nullifying the votes of the juries. The fans had more voting power than they ever did in the history of Eurovision, and it very much affected the outcomes of these contests. The popular vote became much more important than the jury vote.. This can be seen in the results from 2016-2022.
Table 1
In four of the six contests between 2016 and 2022, the winner of the popular vote was the winner of the contest. Even in 2019, where the popular vote winner (Netherlands) didn’t win the contest, the contest winner owed its victory to scoring high in the popular vote rather than scoring high in the jury vote. And beginning in 2021, the gap between the choices of the fans and the juries began to widen. The voting power had shifted to the fans.
Table 2
In short, the juries had lost control. Not only did they no longer have the power to select the Eurovision winner, but their power to influence the outcome was waning. The 2022 contest was a particularly watershed moment. Many people believed that the fan vote for Ukraine, which resulted in Ukraine’s victory, was a “gesture of support” for Ukraine, which had recently been invaded by Russia, and not necessarily based on the quality of the performance by Ukraine’s entry that year. The juries saw this outcome and felt that this was a perfect example of how the fans should not be given so much power to determine the winner of the contest.
But how could the juries re-establish their power without a major change to Eurovision voting rules? By doing, consciously, what the fans were doing unconsciously: voting in a block. The reason why the fans vote was affecting the outcome more than the jury vote was because the fans’ votes tended to be more concentrated than the jury’s votes, which was more widely dispersed among the participating countries. When this kind of voting pattern occurs, the voting block that concentrates their votes has more voting power. This can be illustrated in the following example.
Suppose you have a group of 16 people composed of 8 men, and 8 women, and the task is to vote on what to order for lunch. Suppose further than each of the 8 men votes for a different thing to order for lunch (burger, hot dog, pizza, chicken, salad, sandwich). Suppose the 8 women, before voting, caucus amongst themselves and decide as a group what to order (pasta) and then vote accordingly. The result is that the womens’ choice wins.
This, on a larger scale, was what was happening from 2016-2022. The juries were like the men, individually voting for what they each wanted, while the fan vote was more like the women, voting in a block. We can see this pattern starting to emerge in the voting results in 2016, when we look at the point totals of the top 5 vote-getters of both the jury vote, and the fan vote. Notice the high delta between the point totals of the top five fan vote-getters, and the top five jury vote getters
Table 3
In other words, the fans’ votes tended to be much more concentrated in their top five than were the votes of the juries. The result was that the top fan choices were receiving more votes than the top jury choices.
And this trend continued, (with the exception of one outlier year, 2017, in which Portugal was the top vote-getter of both the fan vote and the jury vote) in favor of the fan votes, particularly with regard to the top vote-getters, hitting a crescendo in 2022, when Ukraine, the fan vote winner, received 156 more fan votes than jury points received by U.K, the top jury-vote winner.
Table 4
If 2016-2021 revealed that the power of the juries was waning, 2022 showed that it was possible for the jury votes to become completely irrelevant.
For the juries to re-assert their power, they were going to have to start voting in blocks that were equal or larger than the naturally occurring voting blocks seen in fan votes.
Here, I must point out that I have no direct personal knowledge of any collusion by the Eurovision juries in 2023 and 2024. But just like a forensic medical examiner doesn’t need to have witnessed a shooting to know that the bullet-riddled corpse on his examination table was shot to death, a forensic examination of the voting results of 2023 and 2024 leaves little room for doubt that there was collusion amongst the juries.
The forensic analysis begins with a look at the following statistic for the years 2016-2022: What was the top number of “12 point jury votes” that a team received in each of the contest years. The significance of this statistic will become evident once we compare these statistics to 2023 and 2024.
Table 5
It should be noted that 2017 was very much an outlier year. Portugal easily won both the fan and the jury vote. Most years do not feature a contestant that is so overwhelmingly the top choice of both the juries and the fans. Taking 2017 as an outlier year, the typical top jury vote getter received between 8 and 11 sets of “12 point votes” from the juries.
Now let’s compare that with 2023 and 2024
Table 6
Throwing out the anomalous results of 2017 in which there was a “consensus contestant”, the comparison between before and after 2022 (When Ukraine won the contest by winning the popular vote by a margin that made jury votes completely irrelevant) is stark.
This contrast can be seen in another statistic, the jury point totals by the top jury vote-getters. Compare the number for 2016-2022, with those of 2023 and 2024
Table 7
As these point totals demonstrate, in 2022 and 2023, the voting by the juries for the top spot was much more homogeneous than in past years. But does this prove collusion by the juries? The obvious rejoinder is that musical and aesthetic preferences are highly subjective, and the fact that the individual juries ended up voting more uniformly in 2023 and 2024 than they have in the past is not proof of collusion. But it is the more likely explanation given that neither 2023 nor 2024 featured a contestant like Salvador Sobral of Portugal in 2017 who was recognized overwhelmingly by jury members and fans alike as the best contestant. If Loreen in 2023 and Nemo in 2024 were such superior contestants, one would have expected them to fare better with the fan vote. Instead, both Loreen and Nemo placed a distant fourth with the fans. Moreover, the subjectivity of musical and aesthetic preferences suggests that there should be more disparity among top choices by the juries, not less.
So we are left with two explanations for the jury voting in 2023 and 2024. The first explanation is that there was no collusion, and that 15 of the 37 juries in 2023 (40.5%) and 22 of the 37 juries in 2024 (59.5%) just happened to settle on Loreen and Nemo, respectively, as the best contestants of those years, while the greatness of these contestants, at least in 2024, was completely lost on the fans, who found four contestants who they believed were better. The number of fan juries who selected Loreen as the top contestant in 2023 was zero. The number of fan juries who selected Nemo as the top contestant in 2024 was 1.
The second explanation is that several juries decided to collude with each other to award victory to a pre-selected contestant. The juries had been seeing their influence over Eurovision wane to the point where, in 2022, the jury votes were completely irrelevant. They juries also saw fans appearing to cast their votes in 2022 as a statement of support for recently invaded Ukraine, rather than voting based on the contestants’ performances. Accordingly, several of the juries decided that voting as a block was the only way to continue to have a voice in the selection of the Eurovision winner, and thus preserve Eurovision as a singing competition rather than as a forum for making geopolitical statements.
Obviously, I see the second explanation as the much more likely explanation, or else I would not be bothering to write this article. I would be inclined to think differently if the voting patterns of the juries in 2023 and 2024 had been more consistent with prior voting patterns by the judges. I would have been inclined to think differently if the jury votes in 2023 and 2024 had gone to a contestant who had similarly broad appeal with the fans, as Portugal’s Salvador Sobral in 2017. I would be inclined to think differently if there wasn’t such an obvious motivation for the judges to collude, based on years of diminishing jury influence that culminated in 2022 with the widest ever disparity between the popular vote point total and the jury’s point total. All of these factors point to collusion.
As I acknowledged at the beginning of this article, I am not certain that the collusion I am describing herein violates Eurovision rules. I am not familiar with how Eurovision rules address the conduct of members of juries, and frankly, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think such collusion should be permitted, and if the rules allow it, the rules should be changed. The voting should not be manipulated the way I believe it was in 2023 and 2024. If such manipulation continues, it is reasonable to believe that fans will lose interest in the Eurovision Song Contest. If the results of the 2022 contest revealed a flaw in the voting system that allowed fan votes to effectively marginalize the votes of the juries, the voting in 2023 and 2024 revealed a flaw in the opposite direction, allowing the jury votes to marginalize the fans. Clearly, Eurovisions voting rules need to be revamped not just to prevent collusion, but to strike a greater balance between the weighting of the fans’ votes with that of the juries.