Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories by Lindsay Wong

3 reviews

sarah984's review against another edition

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dark funny

3.0

A darkly funny horror collection, the stories mostly feature Chinese immigrants in North America (though there are a couple of stories about men and/or set in China). I loved the concept of most of the stories but a few of them felt like they didn't really go anywhere and by the end of the collection the tone felt a little repetitive.

Favourites: Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality, Furniture, Sinking Houses
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anaiira's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

Ugh ok, so this is the second Lindsay Wong book I've read now and I think I can say it - the prose style is not for me; I don't enjoy reading her work. This one is less well written than her memoir. I don't like gross fiction but by the end of the anthology, it's so quotidian that I'm not even feeling revulsion anymore.

I don't love this genre of edgelord female Asian authors masquerading as feminist but then writing work that reads like a 15 year old internet troll that is practicing their SAT vocabulary. Truly, I know there can be more to be read into the work, especially the complex nuance of expectations of women, of East Asian women, and the relationship to cleanliness and purity and subverting expectations but at some point, I also get to choose whether or not this resonates with me and it does not.

Here are some assorted thoughts:
- I hate how she describes everything in such a disgusting way. Everything is the rotting grey liver of a cancerous fish or something equally repulsive. It's like endless stream of fetid putrifaction and ugh.
- I'm falling into the trap of trying to catch her in falsehoods again. This, I am realizing, is a defense mechanism in me. When I don't like something, or am unhappy with something, factual errors are intolerable, especially if I feel like they are being made on purpose.
- Wreck Beach was not named because they thought they would wreck the beach. It was so named after an alleged shipwreck.
- where do these kids go to school that they end up hanging out at wreck beach?!
- science world and wreck beach are so far apart  what high school could be near both
- every story has rape. Every story has trauma. Every story has murder. It's fucking awful. And I get the point thst ir's awful but I don't think she straddles the line between edgy/sharp and needlessly traumatizing well at all.
- It's like someone relishing in an open, festering sore, that rape or mass murder could just be a cool element to a story. There is this diminishing of trauma, and a casualness to it that I find callous and hard to understand.
- I hate when people use pinyin inconsistently. Either use the proper pinyin, or the pinyin without accents, or romanization. It's ridiculous when it's all of them together.
- you don't have 10/20 vision when you are blind in one eye, ffs have you been to an optometrist?
- no one in this book has talked about immortality and I feel fundamentally lied to.

I personally think that if you're writing stories this horrendous, you need to get the details right. And hire some Asian editors.
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obviousthings's review against another edition

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It's really gory and gross, with a flippant tone. Not my thing.
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