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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
I was intrigued from the very beginning of this book. But as I kept reading I found myself losing interest. Despite this, I felt compelled to keep reading to see where this author was taking me. The content seemed very far fetched from the procedures being performed to the character development. It was a great idea but was too far stretched.
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Suicide
Over halfway through the book, I had been planning to give this book 5 stars, but by the end, it all came crashing down, and now I don't really know where I stand with it. Some of it was really good but at the same time, some of it was pretty bad. Then I was going to give it three stars. But I started thinking about how invested I was in this, so I settled on 4.
I have such mixed feelings about this book.
On one hand, it was the most invested I've been in a story in a LONG time. As in, I finished reading this is a day, which hasn't happened in years. It kept me guessing, on the edge of my seat, all the good things you want in this type of book.
On the other hand, it was a bit of a letdown.I'm so effing tired of the bury your gays trope. I don't know what I was expecting in a book with this kind of premise, but this wasn't it. There was also some internalized homophobia in the protagonist through flippant comments that made me uncomfortable. Plus, it really felt like this book was trying to connect sociopathy and video games/real-world violence and video games, which was also tiring, to say the least. And some of the dialogue felt stinted.
But on the first hand, it was interesting! Some of it felt so raw and it did a really good job at placing the reader right in the action. I guess it just depends on where you place your criteria for what makes a good book, and this actually helped me define my criteria better to myself, I think.
I have such mixed feelings about this book.
On one hand, it was the most invested I've been in a story in a LONG time. As in, I finished reading this is a day, which hasn't happened in years. It kept me guessing, on the edge of my seat, all the good things you want in this type of book.
On the other hand, it was a bit of a letdown.
But on the first hand, it was interesting! Some of it felt so raw and it did a really good job at placing the reader right in the action. I guess it just depends on where you place your criteria for what makes a good book, and this actually helped me define my criteria better to myself, I think.
4.25 stars.
So this book is called ‘Anatomy of a murderer’ in the uk. But I prefer the American title and cover so that what I bought.
This was so so good. I’m not really into YA these days as I prefer a more mature plot and characters. But this really surprised me. Sure it had its tropes and eye roll moments, but it had such a interesting concept and really varied characters. I couldn’t stop reading it. I really like that it was set in our world but it had that slight sci-fi bend to it. Strangely it gave me PLL vibes which I’m totally down with and it had that mysterious element as well. I also love that it’s a standalone. I’m really preferring those at the moment.
I’m now super excited to pick you Wilful Machines by this author. Why are more people not talking about Tim Floreen!!
So this book is called ‘Anatomy of a murderer’ in the uk. But I prefer the American title and cover so that what I bought.
This was so so good. I’m not really into YA these days as I prefer a more mature plot and characters. But this really surprised me. Sure it had its tropes and eye roll moments, but it had such a interesting concept and really varied characters. I couldn’t stop reading it. I really like that it was set in our world but it had that slight sci-fi bend to it. Strangely it gave me PLL vibes which I’m totally down with and it had that mysterious element as well. I also love that it’s a standalone. I’m really preferring those at the moment.
I’m now super excited to pick you Wilful Machines by this author. Why are more people not talking about Tim Floreen!!
I flew through this! I almost couldn’t put it down. It was so gripping and kept me on the edge of my seat! I picked this up randomly at a bookstore because the title caught my attention (I hadn’t heard of it before but as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I had to get it.)
This is a complex story with multidimensional characters. You don’t know who/who not to trust. Sometimes it’s a bit hard to grasp the full picture of all the characters as this is written in first person from the perspective of our main character, Rem. However, the author still does a fantastic job with writing his characters.
I honestly did not know how this book was going to end — when I got to the last 100 pages or so, I had absolutely no guesses as to how the story was going to go. Maybe it’s because I have one single brain cell but I really couldn’t predict anything! Obviously not going to talk about the ending specifically because this is a spoiler free review, but I’ll just say my general feelings. I’m not sure how to feel about the ending; it feels appropriate and realistic but also, I was kind of hoping it would have gone in a different direction.
The relationship between Rem and Franklin is a complicated one. You really don’t know if it’s okay to ship them or not, but I found myself doing so anyway. They really broke my heart.
One thing this book does super well is not make everything black and white. Humans are complicated. None of us are perfect. All of us have both good and bad sides; those sides aren’t always equal but we have all made mistakes. I really liked how honest the take on humanity was in this book. I always admire when authors show that their characters aren’t perfect and can be messy and complicated and these characters certainly demonstrate that.
Also this book makes some excellent, really important and necessary points on gun violence and shootings in America.
Overall, I did enjoy this book. I read it in two days which is honestly really fast for me. I definitely want to check out Tim Floreen’s other work and I hope I like it just as much as this one!
[Massive trigger warning for guns, blood, violence, just anything graphic really. I found myself having to skip over detailed descriptions because I couldn’t handle it so if you’re extra sensitive to those things, I don’t recommend this. It’s not often but it does get intense in a few parts].
This is a complex story with multidimensional characters. You don’t know who/who not to trust. Sometimes it’s a bit hard to grasp the full picture of all the characters as this is written in first person from the perspective of our main character, Rem. However, the author still does a fantastic job with writing his characters.
I honestly did not know how this book was going to end — when I got to the last 100 pages or so, I had absolutely no guesses as to how the story was going to go. Maybe it’s because I have one single brain cell but I really couldn’t predict anything! Obviously not going to talk about the ending specifically because this is a spoiler free review, but I’ll just say my general feelings. I’m not sure how to feel about the ending; it feels appropriate and realistic but also, I was kind of hoping it would have gone in a different direction.
The relationship between Rem and Franklin is a complicated one. You really don’t know if it’s okay to ship them or not, but I found myself doing so anyway. They really broke my heart.
One thing this book does super well is not make everything black and white. Humans are complicated. None of us are perfect. All of us have both good and bad sides; those sides aren’t always equal but we have all made mistakes. I really liked how honest the take on humanity was in this book. I always admire when authors show that their characters aren’t perfect and can be messy and complicated and these characters certainly demonstrate that.
Also this book makes some excellent, really important and necessary points on gun violence and shootings in America.
Overall, I did enjoy this book. I read it in two days which is honestly really fast for me. I definitely want to check out Tim Floreen’s other work and I hope I like it just as much as this one!
[Massive trigger warning for guns, blood, violence, just anything graphic really. I found myself having to skip over detailed descriptions because I couldn’t handle it so if you’re extra sensitive to those things, I don’t recommend this. It’s not often but it does get intense in a few parts].
Are people inherently good or evil? Is it all just brain chemistry? To what extent should we make excuses for people's behavior? How far should we go to try and change someone's conscience?
Is it a cool idea to write a romance involving a teenager and someone who murdered two of his closest friends?
All big questions. Some of which I was pretty satisfied with the conclusions drawn by the book, and one of which I was certainly not. Definitely worth a read but certain parts made me uncomfortable, which I guess was the point.
Is it a cool idea to write a romance involving a teenager and someone who murdered two of his closest friends?
All big questions. Some of which I was pretty satisfied with the conclusions drawn by the book, and one of which I was certainly not. Definitely worth a read but certain parts made me uncomfortable, which I guess was the point.
This is one of the most beautiful/fascinating books I have ever read. You're on the edge of your seat for the entire book. It's absolutely amazing.
Holy crap, okay, where do I even begin with this...
Okay -- one of my favourite things about YA fiction is its ability to take very big, heady, and frequently difficult topics and condense them into much smaller, but still profound, products of entertainment that aren't disingenuous to the seriousness of their subject matter. It's a tough tightrope to walk, but a lot of YA does it really well: some of my favourite YA books have been about grief, repression, PSTD and trauma, religion, mental illness, emergent sexuality, suicide... Hell, even serial murders and alien abductions.
So now we have this book, Anatomy of a Murderer, which is really no less ambitiously provocative than others of its type: it's about school shootings, psychopathy, accountability, and even the very nature of evil itself.
My problem is that I honestly have no idea at all how it wants to approach any of these really vast, really touchy topics beyond a whole mess of genre cliché and contrivances. Whatever else it tries to do, it feels like it just throws a hundred things at the wall -- and I don't even know if any of them stick, because there's too much stuff being thrown to see.
I was actually pretty much on board for the relatively uneventful first half of the plot, which has a pretty long page count but in which the most intriguing elements are introduced with a good degree of sensitivity.
Then the problem comes at about the halfway mark, when the simple and engaging story about violence and trauma that has been set up all of a sudden becomes (at once): a murder mystery, a cute m|m romance, a furious suspense-thriller, and a weird techo-sci-fi governmental military conspiracy. The plot goes all over the road and paves over pretty much all manner of subtlety that had been established thus far.
The thing that finally even really galled it for me was when the story kind of just threw out all interesting discussions of its subject matter that it could've pursued -- psychopathy, accountability, and evil, remember -- and gave them all a scapegoat by random fantastical nanotechnology MacGuffin whatsits that are the actual causes for all the bad things that occured. It's as if the book literally just forgot what it was trying to be about, and how it was trying to be interesting or unique in its approach to its subject.
I've said, too, in other reviews that I think sometimes the trap of YA fiction is forcing disparate genres and manners of storytelling into YA's own unique conventions, and honestly no more have I felt that than here in the scenes in which the two lead characters begin falling in love.
Sure, the writing is cute and bittersweet as they bond over classical music and share their first kiss (you're not gonna win me over that easily, AOFM, by having them bond over my favourite composer of all time Philip Glass!!), but -- seriously -- at all times I was reading these scenes I could not stop thinking in the back of my mind of how one of these characters is still a convicted murderer who had escaped custody to basically stalk the other one.
The author writing these scenes the way he did just felt so off in their tonal shift from what had been established, and which made the central relationship make so little sense it brings everything to a crashing holt.
So yeah, the mining of required cutesiness from these kind of fucked-up scenes, along with just so many really unbelievable plot contrivances (someone solving virtually every problem no matter how technically impossible by simply "hacking" it; a character who has been shot at least three times somehow surviving long enough for people around him to have like 15 pages of climactic monologues) I feel like in the end pretty much just torpedo any way of enjoying it for what it was.
I'm a little conflicted about giving this one star. I mean I don't out-and-out hate this book; I finished the thing, and it is pretty polished for what it is: when it wanted me to feel tense I felt tense, when it wanted me to feel sad I felt sad, ect. ect...
But at the end of the day I'm just hugely disappointed for whatever the hell it could've been, which could've been something worthwhile, that actually means something as a whole, and is unified in its themes and its storytelling. Which is not this mess.
Okay -- one of my favourite things about YA fiction is its ability to take very big, heady, and frequently difficult topics and condense them into much smaller, but still profound, products of entertainment that aren't disingenuous to the seriousness of their subject matter. It's a tough tightrope to walk, but a lot of YA does it really well: some of my favourite YA books have been about grief, repression, PSTD and trauma, religion, mental illness, emergent sexuality, suicide... Hell, even serial murders and alien abductions.
So now we have this book, Anatomy of a Murderer, which is really no less ambitiously provocative than others of its type: it's about school shootings, psychopathy, accountability, and even the very nature of evil itself.
My problem is that I honestly have no idea at all how it wants to approach any of these really vast, really touchy topics beyond a whole mess of genre cliché and contrivances. Whatever else it tries to do, it feels like it just throws a hundred things at the wall -- and I don't even know if any of them stick, because there's too much stuff being thrown to see.
I was actually pretty much on board for the relatively uneventful first half of the plot, which has a pretty long page count but in which the most intriguing elements are introduced with a good degree of sensitivity.
Then the problem comes at about the halfway mark, when the simple and engaging story about violence and trauma that has been set up all of a sudden becomes (at once): a murder mystery, a cute m|m romance, a furious suspense-thriller, and a weird techo-sci-fi governmental military conspiracy. The plot goes all over the road and paves over pretty much all manner of subtlety that had been established thus far.
The thing that finally even really galled it for me was when the story kind of just threw out all interesting discussions of its subject matter that it could've pursued -- psychopathy, accountability, and evil, remember -- and gave them all a scapegoat by random fantastical nanotechnology MacGuffin whatsits that are the actual causes for all the bad things that occured. It's as if the book literally just forgot what it was trying to be about, and how it was trying to be interesting or unique in its approach to its subject.
I've said, too, in other reviews that I think sometimes the trap of YA fiction is forcing disparate genres and manners of storytelling into YA's own unique conventions, and honestly no more have I felt that than here in the scenes in which the two lead characters begin falling in love.
Sure, the writing is cute and bittersweet as they bond over classical music and share their first kiss (you're not gonna win me over that easily, AOFM, by having them bond over my favourite composer of all time Philip Glass!!), but -- seriously -- at all times I was reading these scenes I could not stop thinking in the back of my mind of how one of these characters is still a convicted murderer who had escaped custody to basically stalk the other one.
The author writing these scenes the way he did just felt so off in their tonal shift from what had been established, and which made the central relationship make so little sense it brings everything to a crashing holt.
So yeah, the mining of required cutesiness from these kind of fucked-up scenes, along with just so many really unbelievable plot contrivances (someone solving virtually every problem no matter how technically impossible by simply "hacking" it; a character who has been shot at least three times somehow surviving long enough for people around him to have like 15 pages of climactic monologues) I feel like in the end pretty much just torpedo any way of enjoying it for what it was.
I'm a little conflicted about giving this one star. I mean I don't out-and-out hate this book; I finished the thing, and it is pretty polished for what it is: when it wanted me to feel tense I felt tense, when it wanted me to feel sad I felt sad, ect. ect...
But at the end of the day I'm just hugely disappointed for whatever the hell it could've been, which could've been something worthwhile, that actually means something as a whole, and is unified in its themes and its storytelling. Which is not this mess.
4 out of 5 stars
Wow really great book. I thought it dealt with some heavy issues, such as gun violence and the effects media can have on it, really well. I haven't read many books relating to this issue but I thought it was done well in this book.
Wow really great book. I thought it dealt with some heavy issues, such as gun violence and the effects media can have on it, really well. I haven't read many books relating to this issue but I thought it was done well in this book.
