Reviews tagging 'Racism'

The Lost Stories by John Flanagan

1 review

eleanorryd's review against another edition

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slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

This... I don't know where to start. It was formatted like a short story collection but the stories are too connected to function on their own while some of them are so out of place that they cannot function in immediate relation to the others. The order of the stories resulted in terrible pacing, to be honest, and most of it felt like filler content. The framing narrative of the archaeologists truly added nothing and was just kind of tedious, thank goodness those parts weren't too long.

I don't know if this is a spoiler but I'll mark it as one anyway
There was fighting and violence in pretty much all of the different stories. I'm not saying "violence is bad" or whatever but like. John. Buddy. Bestie. There are other ways of telling stories and demonstrating how cool and badass your characters are, they really don't have to kick someone's butt to prove themselves in eeeeevery frkn part. Getting scrappy is not a necessary part of every plot.
 

These next parts are definitely spoilers so:
There was one story in particular that I thought was going to build on relationships between certain characters but no. Oh no. That was silly, of course it is about a woman (who is pretty, because of couse all of them are, god forbid a woman is not incredibly attractive) being a damsel in distress and needing to be rescued. Another story was so blatantly pure Romani/Traveller racism it made me really uncomfortable. What was the point of that. That filled absolutely no purpose other than to spread racism against these minorities and let the main characters "teach them a lesson". Disgusting.


I do have soooome nice things to say
The explanation about how horses get retired was genuinely a question I have had about the books and it was really nice to get that explained. I did get a little bit emotional about that. That was nice.
but that's it, that is pretty much the only nice thing I have to say. So many of these characters feel so two-dimensional and then got even flatter in this book - that is not a short story collection but also not a novel. This kind of format would have been so so so great to work on side characters and giving them meaningful backstories and relationships with each other - not just the main characters - but uh that did not happen. And that was disappointing. That one nice part previously mentioned and the fact that I started reading these books when I was 8 or 10 or something are the only things keeping me from giving this less than a 1. If you're not already emotionally attached to this series: don't bother with this book.
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