Reviews with content warning for Medical trauma - The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

Reviews tagging 'Medical trauma'

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames

7 reviews

lisaarnsdorf's review against another edition

dark sad tense slow-paced

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

1.5

This is a book about women surviving the awful things the terrible men in their lives do to them. It’s a book chock full of tragedies and abuse and there is no justice. I kept waiting for the story to turn, improve, get happy. But it never does. And that’s the worst part about this book — there are so many terrible things that happen and they just keep coming.

It’s also way too long. There was so much that could have been cut out. And, I didn’t really enjoy hearing about the family after they came to America.

Content Warnings

byoung1997's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.5

Content Warnings

seawarrior's review

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dark sad tense slow-paced

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

3.0

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a magical tale of a cursed childhood, which begins and ends as a horror story about the theft of bodily autonomy. While this book is an engaging read, the subject matter also made it a taxing one. By the end of the book I felt almost angry that I had stayed with the Fortuna women so long only to never see them vindicated. Yet our ability to read this story is a vindication in itself. As readers, we grant Stella what she as spent her entire life searching for: understanding, empathy and shared rage.

While this story is fictional, it is written with so much detail and winding family mythologies that it feels real. My favorite part of the book was imagining Stella's nature-rich and independent life in Ievoli, but I felt the chapters about her young adulthood dragged on to the point of frustration, and the story of her adulthood was surprisingly brief. However, this briefness may have been an intentional decision to illustrate her loss of passion for life. I don't doubt that there are many women who lived pieces of Stella's story, and intimately know its pain. The Fortuna women were courageous, capable characters with varied strengths. Yet the world reduced them to property of their fathers and husbands, a fate which Stella desperately tried to escape but had no means to. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to others. While it is a beautifully written and honest portrait of Stella the survivor, her adulthood is so dismal that I questioned why I was putting myself through envisioning these moments in her life at all. I leave the book wondering "What was the point?" Yet as Grames states through her narrator, "of course there never is any point, but until you think that thought for the first time it doesn’t matter that there isn’t".

Content Warnings