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corpuslibris's review against another edition
2.0
I tend to be drawn to books where the idea is better than the execution. I do like the way that the illustrations in this book complement the text, rather than explicitly illustrate it. There were glimmers and flashes of great language and imagery, but they weren't prolonged for the whole novella. I am intrigued by Calamari Press, and I look forward to exploring some of their other titles.
pastelwriter's review against another edition
4.0
I'll keep this review relatively short and sweet as I picked up this novella because it was one of my assigned readings for creative writing class. I have to say, I found this to be a really interesting read. It was a joy to go through the experience of reading this novella, and I absolutely loved it. It wasn't perfect, but it was great from a creative writing perspective.
For the most part, I don’t think the “general” populace will enjoy this book. It’s very weird and is full of odd imagery. It is very much trying to get a message across, multiple ones if you ask me, but it is extremely experimental in the way it does this. It is not a straightforward novella in any shape or form.
I would recommend this book to a fellow creative writing student. From that perspective, this is a fascinating novella to read. There’s many different writing “tricks” that it utilizes which one could consider playing around with for one's own creative writing.
On another note, although this novella was lacking in terms of my favorite aspect of reading, which is having well-developed characters, I still very much enjoyed it. Even though the characters felt flat and like you couldn’t quite touch them, their actions and how they reacted to things still felt significant. There was a meaning behind what they did, some sort of message the author was trying to give, and the characters were used as a vehicle for that. Sure, I would have loved this novella even more if I had actually been able to bond with the characters in it, but I still appreciated the strangeness of them.
Finally, this novella explored a lot of themes. If you were to consider all the little things this novella was criticizing or taking a jab at or analyzing, the list would be quite long. The list would also be very varied in subject. Although this novella didn’t, as far as I was able to tell, focus too much on any one theme, I still felt like it addressed the different subjects relatively well. At the very least, it got you to think about the matters being discussed.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this novella and the way in which it was crafted. I would not recommend it to just anyone, but, if you’re looking for something weird and short to pick up, this is certainly something worth trying.
For the most part, I don’t think the “general” populace will enjoy this book. It’s very weird and is full of odd imagery. It is very much trying to get a message across, multiple ones if you ask me, but it is extremely experimental in the way it does this. It is not a straightforward novella in any shape or form.
I would recommend this book to a fellow creative writing student. From that perspective, this is a fascinating novella to read. There’s many different writing “tricks” that it utilizes which one could consider playing around with for one's own creative writing.
On another note, although this novella was lacking in terms of my favorite aspect of reading, which is having well-developed characters, I still very much enjoyed it. Even though the characters felt flat and like you couldn’t quite touch them, their actions and how they reacted to things still felt significant. There was a meaning behind what they did, some sort of message the author was trying to give, and the characters were used as a vehicle for that. Sure, I would have loved this novella even more if I had actually been able to bond with the characters in it, but I still appreciated the strangeness of them.
Finally, this novella explored a lot of themes. If you were to consider all the little things this novella was criticizing or taking a jab at or analyzing, the list would be quite long. The list would also be very varied in subject. Although this novella didn’t, as far as I was able to tell, focus too much on any one theme, I still felt like it addressed the different subjects relatively well. At the very least, it got you to think about the matters being discussed.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this novella and the way in which it was crafted. I would not recommend it to just anyone, but, if you’re looking for something weird and short to pick up, this is certainly something worth trying.
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