Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - Scorched Grace

Reviews tagging 'Sexual violence'

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy

13 reviews

lilgriff's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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violinknitter's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

1.0

I don't often hate-finish a book, but I got too far in this one and stubbornly carried on to the bitter end. Things I hated about this book:

* Protagonist is supposed to have some sort of experience with investigation, yet makes really amateurish mistakes with evidence handling and communication with firefighters/cops.

* Protagonist has supposedly found a home at the convent where she is now, but dislikes most of the people there. Why does she supposedly love this place?

* I know "incompetent/corrupt officials" is a trope for a good reason, but you still should SHOW it on the page, instead of expecting your readers to assume it because of the genre of the book.

*

Mother superior becomes arsonist because of childhood SA?? Don't love that, especially with it thrown in as a last minute explanation instead of a carefully explored theme.

And, on a personal note (haha), the presentation of music and especially music education was laughably bad. Just, no. But so few authors get that even close to right.

NB: Though I think there are significant missteps by the author, I do think there are some strengths to the writing. I think Douaihy does a beautiful job of writing atmospherically about the convent and New Orleans, and characterization & dialogue were also strong. It wasn't enough to save the book for me, but other readers may have a different experience.

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harpoonholly's review

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There is content that I couldn't get past, that disturbed my experience. What started a NoLa teacozy murder, took a swift dive into themes I just was not prepared for, which is my fault for not researching more thoroughly before downloading it (audiobook read by Mara Wilson, who is an excellent reader), but shouldn't a reader be able to look at a standard back cover and some reviews and have that be enough? Who wants homework? Trigger Warnings aren't going to hurt the story, I promise you.

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evadaisy's review

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dark medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

So unnecessarily traumatising. Maybe it's a good book if you don't mind that sort of thing, but please take care of yourself and check the content warnings. This book is so much darker than I expected and I wouldn't have read it if I'd known.

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epeolatri's review against another edition

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1.5

This had SO MUCH potential. I mean a queer crime solving nun??

It was so boring though. Most of the book was the narrator talking about sweat mixed in with retellings of her traumatic past. The main character did absolutely no “sleuthing” either.

The .5 is for the last chapter alone, in which we learn the motive and the arsonist, neither of which I guessed. I just wish it didn’t feel so rushed.

Also, I really need authors to start researching disabilities before writing about them. There’s a scene where a diabetic is given insulin for hypoglycemia, which would have probably killed him in real life. Please don’t ever do that.

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ecn's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

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

3.0

Honestly way over-hyped :/ I really wanted to like it but within the first descriptions of the MC (and her former love life) there was an offhandedly biphobic description of her ex which basically made me hate the MC from the get go.
The mystery was easily predictable and not a single character was likeable. The story also (unsurprisingly) felt VERY white bc no non-white characters felt fully developed or interesting. There was also *no* mention about police brutality in regards to race - ONLY to queer people - which felt insane not to include given the fact that a young Black student was a suspect the entire time. I’m super disappointed in the author for not having any insight to that.
My last complaint was that the entire thing was also extremely cis-centered (as in transness wasn’t even a THOUGHT to the life of the MC which is always suspicious when the person is a ~feminist lesbian (potential terf?))

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maddiereadswords's review

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

1.5

Read this for a queer book club, and honestly I might have DNF-ed if I hadn't wanted to finish it for the discussion. I think part of it is just that I'm not a huge fan of hard-boiled noir in general, so it's already starting at a disadvantage, but also this book still overall felt like a draft; there are a lot of interesting ideas and concepts, but nothing feels fully fleshed out. All the characters with the exception of Holiday feel completely one-dimensional, and speaking of Holiday, her backstory is so drawn-out that by the time we got to what actually happened to send her to New Orleans, I hardly even cared anymore, but also the backstory was so ridiculously over the top and horrifying that I didn't even want it. Literally the last hundred or so pages of this book felt so needlessly brutal, and it just left me so uncomfortable at the end. Also as other reviewers have mentioned, there are basic things that are just wrong? Everything about diabetes, as well as the fact that there are A TON of Catholic schools in New Orleans and the surrounding area, both of which feel like things that should have gotten picked up on in another round of editing and revision.

Literally the only reason this book is higher than 1 star (which literally just means I finished it) is that every once in a while she would drop an absolute BANGER of a line about Catholicism or the intersection of religion and queerness, and as a lesbian who grew up Catholic and is still nebulously religious, I LOVED that. I wanted so much more of that!! But instead most of what I got was a shoddy, boring mystery with forgettable characters, and a whole lot of trauma right at the end. I know this is meant to be the first in a series, and I truly hope that time and practice can smooth out some of the issues I had with this book. I could see myself potentially picking up another Sister Holiday mystery in the future just to see how on earth she moves on from this book, but I'm not optimistic that I'll like it any better than this one.

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