Reviews

I don’t even know how to start this because this book was so disturbing but so incredibly written. The decent into psychosis, the descent into addiction, the love between Susie & illyana. Some parts of this book were so hard to read but seeing into Illyanas mind and her thought processes were so interesting. It was so poetic and horrifying I loved every minute of it.

Some of these other reviews piss me off as if people who use heroin can’t be intelligent?? Clearly some people don’t understand addiction at all. Addicts are usually extremely intelligent and aware that what they are doing is nonsensical but can’t stop because the drug takes over the spot in their brain where people’s motivations for food and water usually reside it becomes that important this has been studied. I loved the way this book read it was incredibly engrossing and kept me hooked from the beginning. It was insane but also made perfect sense

Content Warnings

bibliocyclist's review

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Even extinction didn't guarantee total, irretrievable obliteration. The science library was loaded with documents about the eohippus. The painted vulture. The mastodon. The moa. The heath hen. The passenger pigeon, hunted to extinction, whose immense flocks in low flight formations blacked out the sun and the sky, whose colonies often number 3 billion birds. The last one died in 1914, but people—people who didn’t get out much and never got a suntan—thought and wrote about the birds, rendering them less extinct, and I thought about them.

I hoped to cripple the archivist in my brain, to shred all documents, to burn the books and then the libraries, to expunge all records of the permanent historic entity that was a life.

I never understood Margarita's notion of partying. My exertions were funereal, not festive.

Kill the hunger so as not to starve.

debumere's review

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5.0

I am rubbish at describing what I read. Ellen Miller is an incredibly impressive writer. There have only been a handful of books that I have read that I have thought amazing and this is one of them. Took a long while to read it because it was drying out in the hot press but I kept glancing at the page number because I was too aware that I was reaching the end. Fantastic.

leahmol's review

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

getlitwithmegan's review

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5.0

I found this to be interesting:

http://danishapiro.com/all-titles/ellen-miller%E2%80%99s-like-being-killed/

milo_rose's review against another edition

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5.0

(4.5)

“I thought my buddies might be right about my inability to die. Like the woman at the puddle, like AnnaMaria, I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t living. I was lingering at that precipice, that edge, that nowhere place where I was alive but barely, delaying the agony of being fully alive, so that meantime I could live partially. If the world wouldn’t kill me, and I couldn’t kill myself, I would be both living and dead. If I could not choose whether to be alive, I would choose how alive I would agree to be. I would calibrate it, measure the degree to which I was willing to participate. All of us–the woman at the puddle, Gerry, AnnaMaria, everyone else up on the rooftops–were playing dead, the way prey animals play dead so as not to be shot. We were both the animals and the hunters with the traps and guns. To avoid being shot–by ourselves, the hunters–we, the hunted, tricked ourselves into believing we were already gone.” (p. 32)

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