4.16 AVERAGE

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

mxinky's review

4.0

Jesse and Stacy gave me three books in this series and I'm really thankful. I read this one while in the ER yesterday, which was just perfect.

A story of a boy sent to a mental hospital and denied all of his tapes, including Master of Reality. I was worried about this form of storytelling, at first, but in the end it worked out well.

I didn't listen to Black Sabbath until college, and the book brought out some qualities of the band that I didn't appreciate.
basedqt's profile picture

basedqt's review

5.0
emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
emily_g's profile picture

emily_g's review

5.0
challenging dark emotional hopeful informative sad medium-paced

bpello2020's review

informative inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced
challenging dark emotional hopeful lighthearted reflective sad tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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thegayngelgabriel's review

4.0

Another reviewer said it better but yes: this is absolutely some Where the Red Fern Grows but for crazy kids (or former crazy kids? unclear on how time factors into the being a crazy kid tbh) shit. Thank you, as ever, Mr. Darnielle. I'm 26 right now and was looking through my to-read list trying to pick a book a few days ago because I needed something, right now, about being unhinged, and this. This was a pretty good pick on my part, tbh. Good timing.
lucaswhite1's profile picture

lucaswhite1's review

3.5
dark emotional funny reflective fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
jessrock's profile picture

jessrock's review

4.0

I think the strongest testimony I can give for this book is that I've never had any interest in listening to Black Sabbath before, but this book made me desperate to listen to Master of Reality immediately.

An unusual entry in the 33 1/3 series, which are usually nonfiction essays about specific albums, John Darnielle's book is a young-adult novel told via letters from a teenage patient in a psychiatric hospital to one of the staff members there. He's been instructed to keep a journal, but the staff read what the patients write, so he decides that he's going to write his entries about how much he loves Master of Reality and why the staff really need to give him his Walkman and tapes back. Over the course of his journal, his entries move from open hostility to a surprisingly confessional tone (given the audience he's writing for). The whole thing has that wide-eyed, earnest feel of [b:Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311457667s/5107.jpg|3036731] or [b:The Perks of Being a Wallflower|22628|The Perks of Being a Wallflower|Stephen Chbosky|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312855306s/22628.jpg|2236198].

If you've ever loved a record so much that you memorized all the lyrics and felt like every song was about your life, Roger's impassioned entries about Master of Reality will make immediate sense to you. I think what works particularly well about this book is that Roger doesn't focus on the things that make him different from the reader (we get only the dimmest hints of why he's even in the hospital - he and his stepfather didn't get along, and there's a fleeting reference to a suicide attempt) but rather on that sense of what it means to love and relate to a work of art.

alexcmbk's review

4.0
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character