TELL ME SOMETHING TRUE

In this indulgent romantic debut, half-American, half Colombian Gabriella discovers she and her mother share a taste for forbidden men.

High-flown description and sentiment, even the occasional serious theme (e.g., cross-cultural identity), do little to dress up Cobo’s thin, implausible characters and storyline. Beautiful, rich Gabriella, who lost her mother Helena in a plane crash when she was four, spends her Christmases in Colombia at the home of her beautiful, rich grandmother. Twenty-one-year-old Gabriella’s only worry is the pressure for perfection coming from her handsome, rich father, a filmmaker in L.A. But on her latest trip to South America, two things happen: first she finds Helena’s diary, which reveals an adulterous affair, and then she falls for handsome, rich Angel Silva, the suave yet vulnerable son of a jailed Mafioso drug baron. (In case you hadn’t noticed, all the protagonists here are gorgeous and wealthy.) Despite grandma’s disapproval, Gabriella chooses not to resist Angel’s advances. After all, she tells herself, he is not like his father; he despises drugs and makes his money as a pop promoter. (She manages to avoid the question of why Angel needs the protection of many bodyguards.) When the ecstatic couple is not together, Gabriella works on uncovering the truth about her mother, meeting Helena’s lover and learning why she was on the plane that crashed. Cobo uses violence to push the plot forward as the story moves towards its predictable conclusion.

A soapy melodrama with poetic aspirations.