The Queen of the Night - Alexander Chee

From some of the books I have read lately, I am seeing I should have taken French instead of Spanish back in the day.

 

And what is with this new trend of not using quotation marks when writing speech? It makes it incredibly hard to tell what is thought and what is spoken. I was an English minor in college, and this sort of language blasphemy makes me recoil almost as much as hearing someone say "conversate".