Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Too much fat shaming for me.

This chapter might as well say the shamefully fat fat man fatted fattily across the room, his disgraceful fat disgustingly fatting around his fatness.

A bummer because I am enjoying and intrigued by the narrative structure but Christ I don’t have to put up with this.

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brittaanson's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.0

I wanted to love this book, and the beginning really sucked me in with the mystery. The structure is ambitious and intriguing, but by the end, I was confused and unsatisfied. Partly due to the nature of the plot, there wasn’t any deep character development, and as the truth of what was going on was revealed, I disliked the story more and more. The ending has so many twists that didn’t feel completely earned, and by that point I didn’t care about any of the characters. The rules, ethics, and motivations of those driving the story remain ill-defined to me. I didn’t enjoy the violence and aggressive fat phobia in the book. However, I will concede that the cleverness of the overall concept may be enough for someone else to find more satisfaction in this read than I did.

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monstersinspace's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.0

Spoilers throughout: Interesting and well written, I don't know how the author kept up with all the characters and days. I could have done without the whole "omg this character is so fat and disgusting how can he even exist" chapters but what can you do? I actually did predict most of the ending, but I don't know how I feel about Aiden forgiving Anna for brutally torturing and killing his sister and arguably he didn't he just chose to live as someone that it basically didn't happen to. Also it's not like Anna realized she was a horrible disgusting murder, they literally just made her forget she was and I don't think that's the same thing. It all kind of just doesn't vibe with me, usually people who think anything is forgivable are the ones that need that forgiveness. Also the fact that Anna can just live without the horrible things she did if she wanted to, while her victims have to remember it every day is really fucked up. The whole time Aiden interacts with multiple people who love brutality and murder and he's disgusted by them, yet he's totally cool with Anna having done that cause he thinks she changed but all she did was forget how much she loved those things.

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tneumann's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated

3.5

Ambitious and mostly entertaining, despite my low grade confusion for a good chunk of the book. I appreciate what the author was aiming for - quite the feat to keep track of all the details and weave them together. While I wouldn’t mind if it were shorter, not sure what’d you’d cut out so length was appropriate to fit in all the perspectives from the various hosts.

A few things that were not my favorite:
1. So much fat phobic language for Ravencort. It was lazy writing, there are better ways to write about this characters physically abilities.
2. Aiden took most things as truth for the first half of the book, happily accepting what various people said and being resolute in whatever the new truth was. Then in the later part, his theories became much more secretive to the reader. I understand why, but it was a bit shift and think there were more skillful ways to keep the reader in the dark.
3.

Wasn’t invested in Anna’s reveal and reformation, the latter felt very unconvincing. Aside from murdering Aiden’s sister, the details were so vague that it was hard to understand the magnitude of what she had done. And how much had she really changed and proven herself other than what we see in her actions over the course of the day. And all is supposed to be forgiven?
4. Would have liked to understood more about Daniel’s history, and the footman was just a rando killing for fun?

I liked the reveal of the Plague Doctor and that this was all a justice reformation system, and how much time they’d been there.

Interesting, ambitious, fun aside from being confused for a good part of it, and not quite as expertly executed as it could have been.

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ixcaliber's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.5

Pretty fun puzzle box of a story. Would be much better without the dedicated fatphobia arc.

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emily98griffin's review

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

1.75

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