Reviews with content warning for Gaslighting - Magma

At first glance it seems 20 year old Lilja has met the one! He's handsome, he’s intelligent & he reads, but it becomes apparent quite quickly that he is far from Mr. Right. She starts seeing him most days, moves in & slowly she becomes entrenched in a relationship full of abuse, manipulation & gaslighting & unfortunately she's unable to see the wood for the trees.

Thóra tells Lilja's story using short diary-like chapters which gives the reader an insight into the tortuous events Lilja experiences daily. I think this format worked beautifully for this piece as it really allowed us into the mind of Lilja & how she was experiencing & interpreting the situation. People often look in at abusive relationships & pontificate the age old line "Why doesn't she leave?". Thóra's brutal showing of Lilja's inner thought's answers that quite quickly. We see her mental health & any scrap of belief in herself be completely obliterated until the point where she believes it's all her fault & she sees no alternative, besides making herself 'better'. This evoked some strong emotions as I really just wanted Lilja to be able to see her own self worth & to be able to escape this torment.

This book does not apologise for being raw & brutal in its telling of Lilja's story. With unflinching honesty Hjörleifsdóttir shows the deep effects of gaslighting & domestic abuse. The format of the chapters along with Thóra's beautiful yet tense prose had me holding my breath at many points. I couldn’t bear to put it down & finished in one sitting.

Unfortunately, when some authors write victims of abuse they can portray them in an almost naive & weak manner but I loved that Hjörleifsdóttir portrays Lilja as a strong, beautiful & intelligent young woman who has succumbed to a torrent of abuse.

Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir has tackled the rampant pandemic issue of domestic abuse with a raw & brutal yet beautiful & considerate touch & shines a light on the fact that there are so many more Lilja's sitting out there in desperation, isolation & silence.

Content Warnings

xylotrupes_gideon's review

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dark emotional fast-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

bookishcori's review

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dark sad tense fast-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Content Warnings

raniaa's review

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dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

whatvictoriaread's review

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challenging dark emotional sad fast-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

shrutislibrary's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

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

3.75

'Magma', a word I searched desperately throughout this book trying to decipher its meaning: is it lava? a girl's name? a dream lost? an unbridled rage?

Just like the narrator of 'Rebecca', Mrs De Winter who is haunted by the ghost of the lingering Rebecca at Manderley, Lilja is threatened by the ever-present ghost of a girl online, the titular red-haired Magma - the object of her lover's desire, lust and undivided attention.

'Magma' is the story of a 20-year-old college girl named Lilja and her descent into a dark void to which she is inevitably drawn and can't resist until she falls. Until she has reached the end of this dark crevice and she has broken and shattered her very being.

The novella starts with Lilja's heady, whirlwind romance with a man she meets online while travelling in Central America
(whose age we don't get & he has crazy unimaginable fetishes) which quickly turns into a manipulative, co-dependent relationship in which she loses her identity, her dignity, her life and herself and from which she is unable to come out.

The short chapters read like fragmented diary entries by Lilja tracking her psychotic breakdown as we bear witness to her nagging suspicions of her lover's infidelity, her growing jealousy, her resentment, her overlooking the warning signs and disregarding the gaslighting, her denial in thinking she can somehow 'fix' him. Lilja feels lust, love, jealousy, obsession, anger, humiliation, rage, disappointment, denial, erasure and in the end a glimmer of hope amidst the darkness or so we are told. The author has painted a brutally raw picture of the twisted cycle of emotional & psychological dependency on the abuser to the point where Lilja is capable of seeing & acknowledging the gaslighting, the subtle violence and who he truly is but can't will herself to come out of that abuse. For Lilja, the abuse and the manipulation is the normality that defines the dynamic of her relationship.

Content Warnings

bookishpip's review

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challenging dark 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

I’ve seen a few reviews for this and a copy has been sat on my shelf for a while. I was glad to finally be able to read it. It’s a short novella, and has incredibly short chapters (typically 1-2 pages, but sometimes as short as a few lines) and I think this is one of the reasons that I managed to read this book in one sitting in around one hour.

Although this is a short and quick read, it’s certainly not for the faint hearted. It’s a series of brutal snapshots into the life of Lilija, a young woman in a manipulative and abusive relationship.

I was surprised by how much feeling was expressed in this book without very much having been written. It felt like every word was purposeful; every chapter was a short, sharp, fresh blow to the emotions. This also contained one of the shortest but most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read of how it feels to be on anti-depressants.

Overall, this was an incredibly perceptive novella and I can understand why so many people loved it. Currently for me it’s a 3.5 star read, but I may revise this once I’ve had some time to digest it further.

Content Warnings

lianne_rooney's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense 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? It's complicated

3.75

Content Warnings

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