Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - My Friends

Reviews tagging 'Physical abuse'

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

116 reviews

ngerling's review against another edition

3.0

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I have a love/hate relationship with this book. It was SO difficult to get into. It was highly recommended to me and maybe that was part of the problem. Also, reading the description of the book doesn’t truly tell you what it’s about. I didn’t find anything to connect to until p. 177. From there until p.425 there were a few other sentences and paragraphs that knocked me around, made my heart beat faster, made my heart slow down, made me sad, & made me happy. It is not a book I would recommend or read again, but a few things will stick with me. They definitely aren’t the uplifting things that so many others wrote about the book.

Content Warnings

ncholmes2022's review against another edition

1.5

challenging dark emotional funny sad tense

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This was my third Fredrik Backman book. I wanted to love this book, but it frustrated me so much! It did have excellent prose, likeable characters, and important themes. But it also had too much cursing, too many fart jokes, and too many bad things happening to the characters. At first the sad themes were relatable, but by the middle it felt too heavy-handed, and by the end it felt like emotional manipulation. The term trauma porn comes to mind.

The book started losing me when the janitor died the very day after meeting the artist. The worst part was being led to believe that Joar was going to die throughout the entire book! I was so mad when he was alive! That felt cruel, manipulative, and unnecessary to have the readers bracing themselves for his death.

The characters also fell into stereotypes--

Ted the nerd, Joar the jock, Kimkim the queer tragic artist, and Ali the girl!

--and their dialogue felt unrealistically sappy, even for teenagers with a trauma bond. I would not recommend this book to others, and at this point I am not sure whether I will continue with the author.

Content Warnings

franklola's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous emotional funny reflective sad slow-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

Content Warnings

heartfelthullabaloo's review against another edition

4.75

challenging emotional hopeful reflective 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

This was my first Fredrik Backman because it seemed like a lot of his novels were getting mixed reviews but this one only seemed to be getting positive ones. I loved it, it was a sweet story about a hard topic.

Some quotes that stood out to me:

-The worst thing you can give evil is free time.

-You can become whatever you want to in this life as long as you don’t become a critic. Not of other people and not of yourself. It’s so easy to become a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics. Art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.

-You can’t love someone out of addiction.

-Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.

-A violent man is a sickness for all around him. Violence is a plague that spreads through everybody it comes into contact with. Violence isn’t a genetic illness. Violence is a contagion. It passes from skin to skin and the heart gets infected.

Content Warnings

katies_bibliotherapy's review against another edition

3.0

informative reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I love Backman's writing, but this one just didn't do it for me. I didn't connect to any of the characters and, in a book that relies solely on the characters to tell the story, connecting to them is key. I was honestly bored for most of this and wondered where we were going, only to be disappointed when it felt like we went nowhere. The pacing was slow and that made it difficult to stay engaged while listening to the audiobook.

This one has a lot of five-star reviews, so take this with a grain of salt. I'm on outlier island with this one. Check trigger warnings before going into this one.

Content Warnings

andrea_kilin's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad 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: No

I do not possess the vocabulary to express how good this book is. I love everything Fredrik writes, this one tops all.

Content Warnings

beate251's review against another edition

3.75

dark emotional hopeful reflective sad 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

The frame of this story is 39 year old Ted and 18 year old Louisa on kind of a road trip, mostly on an endless train, to try and sell the very expensive famous painting by artist C. Jat, who was Ted's friend and just died after an illness. Louisa is an escaped foster kid who still grieves her friend Fish who died of an overdose. While travelling, Ted tells Louisa about the summer when his group of friends that also comprises Joar and Ali, were 14 and when this first picture, that would make the artist world-famous, was conceived.

None of the four friends had great parents. Especially Joar's old man who was a violent drunk. There is a lot of drug and alcohol abuse, bullying and violence in their youth, and I felt it was too much. The artist, who didn't get a name until the end, was probably on the spectrum, and his parents didn't understand how special he was. The author is trying to uphold the tension of something awful to come, but it takes most of the book to get there and I didn't find it awful at all, but I felt manipulated by the way the scene was described, making us think something happened that hadn't.

I find it very difficult to review this. I can objectively see that it's well-written, and I usually love Fredrik Backman's books but this didn't capture me. It is too literary and felt like a cross between a misery memoir and a dissertation about art. We get so many observations about what art is, it's this, it's that... The art stuff didn't interest me, and all of the protagonists had had a difficult childhood, as if you needed that to appreciate art. The author introduced random side stories, like what was Christian doing in there?

The short chapters make it very readable but the middle seems drawn-out. I liked Ted and Louisa but didn't care all that much about the others. If you like stories about art, friendships and found family, this might be for you, just don't expect this to be funny and light-hearted like A Man Called Ove.

Content Warnings