Reviews tagging 'Suicidal thoughts'

The Tangleroot Palace: Stories by Marjorie Liu

2 reviews

gothnailcare's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No
Declining to give this a star rating, but it didn't resonate with me. 

  • "The Briar and the Rose" was the absolute gem here in my opinion, and its length and pacing worked for it and not against it.
  • "Call Her Savage" felt like bits excerpted from a novel where the rest of the text was missing and sorely needed...
  • Similarly, "After the Blood" was conceptually interesting but ended on a note that seemed to set it up as a prequel to... something? Again, was structurally not a successful short story to me.
  • “The Last Dignity of Man”: while I really liked it, it was a stark departure from the rest of the stuff in it was collected with and I get why it's polarizing.

The other stories were inoffensive to me but also felt like fairly safe re-tellings or re-interpretations of folktales or fairytales. I understand from reading the reviews that other editions of this book included the author's notes on the inspiration for each story, but the audiobook I listened to — a nine hour audiobook by Recorded Books, Inc, narrated by Catherine Ho — did not include any such notes, either between stories or at the end. I'm not sure what the case is — whether no audiobook editions of this collection have these notes, or whether the author's notes were recorded but cut out of the recording for library copies, as publishers sometimes purposely strip errata from media licensed to libraries. Whatever the case is, I will have to seek them out elsewhere.

I also did not enjoy the narration of this book, which also diminished my experience. I found that the narrator had a habit of not enunciating vowels when doing a "spooky" or "scary" or "growly" voice, which led to me repeatedly rewinding in order to understand what was being said, especially if I was dealing with noise like buses or trains outside my headphones.
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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense

4.0

I so badly wanted my Monstress fix that I went and read an entirely unrelated short story collection just because it was written by the same author. So do with that what you will. 

This whole collection has a vibe like a dark fairy tale. Even though three of the stories are ones I would not label “fantasy,” they all had the same mood of magic gone dark and twisted and violent even when there was no magic in the story at all. Several of them also contain forests that are magically twisted and/or otherwise dangerous, but I’m not sure what to make of that theme. 

The emphasis in these stories is on the darkness in humans. A lot of the worlds are magical and twisted, but it’s the humans who make them violent and dangerous. There are things out there that can hurt you, but the ones who will do the most damage are frightened and angry people, and you won’t see it coming. 

Personally, I like stories that aren’t afraid to go dark. Every single story in this collection goes hard on blood and trauma. That makes it a very intense reading experience – not the kind of book it’s easy to read straight through. The breaks between stories provide a nice opportunity to take a break from all the feelings and trauma in the stories. 

None of these stories particularly stood out to me, but none of them were bad. Each was unique and compelling and did a great job grabbing my emotions. It’s not really the Monstress fix I wanted when I picked it up, and I think that prevents me from unequivocally saying it’s awesome, but these stories are all very good. 
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