Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - We Are the Ants

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

113 reviews

onthesamepage's review against another edition

dark emotional slow-paced

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

3.0

Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.

This is such a bleak read, and I'm having a difficult time reviewing it. Looking at it objectively, this is a good book. The writing is stellar, the characters are nuanced, and it tackles some difficult topics. But I think the sheer multitude of issues this book is trying to tackle caused a disconnect for me.

It probably doesn't help that, within the first few pages of the book, Henry says the following two things:

Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant.

and

I’m telling you that tomorrow— January 29, 2016— you can kiss your Chipotle- eating, Frappuccino- drinking, fat ass good- bye.

Both lines got my hackles up; one feels like a dig at Indigenous people, and the other is lowkey fatphobic. And I think I just never got over that first impression. Because while I understand that Henry is suffering and going through a lot, that doesn't excuse him from insulting and belittling other people.

There were also a lot of contradictions in the way certain characters behaved that were difficult for me to rationalize. We have Henry's brother, who bullies him just as much at home as he gets bullied in school, including punches to the stomach, but I'm supposed to believe that he's suddenly protective of Henry when bullies at school assault him? Is this one of those, "I'm family so that makes it okay" things? I understand that all of the characters in this book are messed up, but I was getting whiplash from how quickly they went from one way of acting to a different one.

The same goes for Henry himself--

the entire plot revolves around him getting abducted by aliens, who tell him the world will end and he can save everyone by pressing a red button. Except he doesn't want to, because the world sucks. And the world keeps sucking, because the good things that happen to him are by far outweighed by the bad. And yet somehow, I was supposed to believe that by the end of the book, after countless traumatic incidents and a few days of therapy, Henry feels differently about the world, and I just didn't buy it.

That doesn't mean there was nothing good about the book. The inclusion of different doomsday scenarios was pretty interesting and amusing. I actually liked most of the characters, and how they felt like actual, flawed, human beings. There's a lot of depth to the relationships, and I appreciated the way those evolved and how the characters grew. I can definitely understand why this book had such a huge impact on so many people, it just wasn't the right book for me.

Content Warnings

nikereadsbooks's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring 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

4.25

Content Warnings

gummysmile's review

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emotional inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Literally beautiful, shows the highs and lows of human life and the spirit it takes to grow and change in a world that is so messed up. Let’s you learn that people make mistakes and say the wrong things but everyone deserves to be okay and to get help. Our meaningless lives aren’t meaningless to us or the people around us and this crafted that narrative beautifully.

Content Warnings

grasstaxi's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

3.0

Content Warnings

chrisljm's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

3.25; Objectively, this is a good story and it was written very well. I see why so many people love it and why it means so much to them, and I understand it can be especially important to those who’ve read it during specific times in their life. But subjectively it was hard for me to read because it was so incredibly bleak and depressing, and I didn’t enjoy that.

Content Warnings