Reviews

Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

cowdisease125's review against another edition

1.0

"‘I wonder why you’d claw your way up a vast rock, only to scramble down the other side again.’ ‘So that you’d know you had,’"

Pretty much just sums up why I finished this fucking thing.

All of that - ALL of THAT - because of a ribbon?

beepuke's review

dark informative 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

4.0

awoodhouse's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

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

4.0

nelli_lakatos's review against another edition

2.0

DNF’d at 84%

First of all I want to say that this isn’t a bad book it was well written but it wasn’t the book for me. Historical fiction is my least favorite genre and this was that.
It was just hard for me to keep reading it and at one point I realized I don’t actually care about what’s going to happen in the end so I stopped reading it.
For some positive things I really liked the main character Mary she was a brave and admirable girl. Also I enjoyed the writing style.
I would recommend this book to you if you like historical fictions and want to read a classic coming of age story.

tammiesven's review against another edition

1.0

I, for one, am glad Mary is dead. She was a real snollygoster!

rosekk's review against another edition

4.0

Well the ending was something of a surprise. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I really enjoyed the book. The characters were detailed, and felt individual. Her writing painted a picture of the London & Monmouth of the time. Mary's story was a fairly addictive thing to follow. I did feel as though the end was a little incongruous, but having read the note in the back of the book and discovered that it was loosely based on a true story, I find the ending less improbable since in real life the end doesn't always have to make sense with the rest of it. Donoghue did a good job bringing very distant, little known people to life in the novel. The only reason it didn't get 5 stars was because it's taken me a while to read, and I've had little else to do, and I know me - if I'd loved the book enough to give it 5 stars I would have had trouble putting it down.

anniew415's review

4.0

Woah. Dirty, bloody, gory, smelly and full of sang-froid. I suppose I should know better than to have expected a happy ending (I can be so naive.) Donoghue has made a modern re-telling of a story of a very bad girl whom you're still rooting for no matter how evil she proves herself to be. Has she been misled? Was it a matter of circumstance & environment, or is she really poisoned at the core? You have no idea until the final few pages (at least I didn't.) Very Tess of the D'Urbervilles meets Becky Sharp meets... well, to name someone else would give it away.

As a fashion person I also loved the sartorial details. Amazing! Went back to my costume encyclopedias to look up some of the terms just to make sure I knew what the silhouettes were and how they all went together. 1760s are a little bit before what we commonly see (most fashion histories begin around 1780s with the French Revolution), and while similar, there are differences.

This book would make an AMAZING film...

smashleyxk's review against another edition

2.0

Didn't know this was based on a true story. Well written but very heavy from start to finish .

hannmargret's review

dark reflective tense slow-paced

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

4.0

kellysmaust's review

4.0

So this is one of Emma Donoghue's earlier books, and while it shows the great promise that was to come in her later works, you can definitely see in this one that she wasn't quite there yet. We've got the historical detail, the skillful writing, the unflinching look at the darker side of our past world, but Slammerkin's Mary Saunders fails to become the unforgettable, sympathetic, nuanced, true-to-life heroine that Donoghue created with Frog Music's Blanche or The Wonder's Lib Wright. Unfortunately, her character suffers from the same problem I had with Kaya in Where the Crawdads Sing - due to difficult choices made in the aftermath of horrific trauma, isolation, and stigma from the "normies," Mary Saunders is considered a monster by society and we feel sorry for the way she is trapped and alone - until she proves them all right by

Spoiler

brutally murdering someone! Seriously, I didn't realize this was based on a real person until I got to the random murder - I was like, there was absolutely no indication that's were this story was going and I don't understand why this happened. This must have been something that happened in real life and so the author put it in. Yep!

There is still much to appreciate in this book, but everything Donoghue was trying to do here she did so much better in [b:Frog Music|18295858|Frog Music|Emma Donoghue|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1393227215l/18295858._SY75_.jpg|25778638], so I'd recommend that instead!