Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

Angels & Man by rafael nicolás

1 review

pika_berry's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

It's not as good as the first book.  The author certainly has a good story to tell, and I can see the vibe they're going for.  However, you can tell that the writer is a newbie trying to learn the craft, and it's clunky and hard to follow. 

As a content warning, probably don’t read this book if you are mentally ill or in a place where you hate people in general. This book will make it worse. 
Honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone committed suicide after reading it. The antinatalist messaging is pretty strong. 

Here are some issues I found distracting: 
  • They invent new phrases that are supposed to be aesthetic, I guess, but come across as sloppy.  
  • They have a habit of making a character think something in dialogue form.  This is fine once every chapter or so, but they rely on it too heavily. Sometimes it is borderline impossible to tell whether it is a thought or dialogue, requiring the reader to reread the sentence for no good reason. 
  • They'll spend way too much time depicting unimportant details in depth, then skim over transitions that SHOULD be accentuated.  For example, they'll abruptly change from one perspective to another without any indication they did so, with no line breaks, nothing.  I don't think the writer currently has the skill to pull off these advanced attempts at playing with pacing. 
  • The main characters (Azazel and Sam) don't have enough depth or interest to pull the story tbh.  Azazel comes across as a generic NPC, and Sam as a cardboard cutout of someone with anger issues. Naturally, the romance between them felt dry and uninteresting. I could not give a shit. 
  • The infodump where someone (I don't even remember who) drones on about what happened in book 1 was horrible, and I skipped it. If I recall correctly, this happened a couple of times and it was annoying. Though understandable since there were so many random characters in book 1. 
  • Heavy misogyny.  I usually don't care for feminist discussions, but the book literally depicts female humans as manipulative animals using lust and emotional attachment to drag the angels into suffering.  There is no getting around this. Perhaps the writer wanted to accentuate the woes of gay people.  The attempt came off as preachy and heavyhanded. You don't need to shit on women to honor gay people. 

But the good news is that most of the flaws are technical, meaning they will go away once the writer gets better at the craft.  They definitely have a knack for sadness porn, as witnessed in the great reviews on this site, and so have the potential of taking on an Anne Rice kind of position in the LGBT fantasy scene once the craft is there. Maybe another five to ten books and it will kick in (which is normal: study mega bestsellers from the past 30 years or so, and you will find that most have a bunch of novice works they needed to get out of their system before reaching a wider audience. They may have been unpublished, or sold under a different pen name. It’s called practice).

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