Reviews with content warning for Rape - The Interestings

Reviews tagging 'Rape'

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

16 reviews

rivareads's review against another edition

emotional reflective medium-paced

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

2.0

I always thought this book would be a pretentious, trying to hard to be deep coming of age story, but now I know for sure it's a pretentious, trying to hard to be deep coming of age story.
I honestly just finished because it has the right amount of literary quality under all the pretentiousness and the perfect pacing to be read in waiting rooms.
The characters are deep down flawed in a way that makes them truly unlikable, shallow and tonal. The character driven conflict is completely circular, which destroys any chance of character development. The inner conflict goes in circles and it's kind of hard to believe a 50 year old who was a therapist would still react the same way has she would when she was a teen. The characters are very black and white up until the point they are made to be morally grey, which fails and makes them dull. These people never actually develop anything, they a re always recycling the same things they felt when they were teens.
The truly remarkable thing about this book is how shallowly it addresses controversial and heavy topics such as sexual assault and AIDS. These are treated like things to add to the plot and create a dramatic moment. there's no deep conversation about the consequences of sexual assault and how it affected a young girl. Instead all is presented in a careless and even tacky way. "so this happened because it's a good plot point and made this guy, who is very cute by the way, did we mention that?, only 200 times , run away to Iceland and fullfil his tragic descent into a degenerate "
It runs in circles to nowhere and it is as pretentious as you'd think about a group of people who titled themselves the interestings.

Content Warnings