Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Reviews tagging 'Pedophilia'

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

105 reviews

charliebk_2's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional funny mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

rhyanashah's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense slow-paced

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

1.25

I spent more time frustratedly talking to others about this book than I did reading it. I've never DNF'd a book but this is the closest I'd ever been

From the absolutely infuriating main character, incredibly slow moving plot, messy finale, and a bordering obscene amount of referencial head-nodding that makes Ernest Cline's Oasis/Wade Watts series look timid.

I struggled with every aspect of this book, and it's genuinely a shock considering how this book has almost everything i love.
Horror, non-white protagonists who must personally grow in spite of trauma, small town secrets, potential Queer storyline.

Instead i have.... whatever thiw was. An insufferable lead, about 200 unnecessary pages and a lot of loose threads that were "Yada-Yada"'d through at the end. How can i be bored when there's MURDER happening? And yet. The "sisterly" relationship between our main and another character just came across like "historians will say they were friends" energy.

Also TW/Spoiler warning

did not enjoy whole scenes of our protagonist being effectively deadnamed and outed as a child victim whilst 4 other characters try and force them to confront/confess allegations against their parent.

I must also add that i never EVER feel comfortable about men writing from the perspective of young women/female children who have been S/A'd or R****d.

Whilst not all of the topics i've put in the content warning are Graphic, they are all frequent and i do emplore anyone considering reading this book to consider if they will be affected by these topics, and to avoid if that is the case.

In a summary, i think the book is about 50% too long and i was disappointed by about 150 pages in, but continued on. The ending was VERY disappointing. I only said "medium paced" because 300 pages are slow and 150 aren't but there is no "inconsistently paced" option.

Content Warnings

readingbymyself's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense

3.0

To preface this: I've never watched a slasher in my life.
But actually the obsession with slashers wasn't what bothered me and that part of Jade's personaliy I did believe.
Neither did I mind the way this was paced. It reminded me of The Only Good Indians, which I loved and which also feels a bit like two separate stories.

There were some other writing choices I found weider:
The reader is forced into Jade's mind but at some parts I felt completly removed from her. For example, she stepped into a bear trap and at no point is her pain described. I actually thought it was a none issue until it says she can't walk very well anymore.
Also, the decision to completely side-lined Jade's relationship with her mother is very strange to me. I was hoping that the big cathartic moment at the end would be between those two.. especially because this story was so heavy on the male adults...

Aside from that I also had a real problem keeping all the different background stories/myths/legends straight. I read this book in three days but by the end reveal I had almost completely forgotten all the pertinent information we'd gotten at the beginning. (But I also didn't care enough to look for the sections and re-read them.)

I thought the action at the end was well done but I didn't like the reveal and sorry to say but I just skim-read the final chapter; that felt like pure kitsch to me (are slashers just like that?)

Content Warnings

inked_bookworm's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark slow-paced

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

1.0

Dear straight male authors, stop using - check content warning - as plot device. It’s cheap, exploitative and disrespectful to survivors.

Content Warnings

jayla_hh's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.75

Pacing seems horribly slow until 70% of the way in. Actual plot details with the narrators long winded imagining of events made it a creative unreliable narrator but not in a way I very much enjoyed.

Content Warnings

cinderrunner's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

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

2.5

PLEASE CHECK TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR THIS BOOK

This book is just okay. Its very slow moving and long winded. The action doesn't pick up til about 50 pages from the end. The suspense to get there and the buildup felt very weak. I do think its important to note that (according to a google search) the author is native american. The book features a lot of negative stereotypes that would feel very racist coming from an author who was not indigenous. I find this grown man's way of handling writing a story about underage girls to be uncomfortable. When we get introduced to our "final girl" he uses weirdly sexual language when describing her (who again, is only a HS student). There is also a very weird gay baity vibe with Letha and Jade that I don't appreciate. Jade's tragic backstory felt like it came out of left field and felt entirely unnecessary, especially comint from a grown man writing about an underage girl. The SAME effect, that one could try to use to justify why it was valid to have Jade have been through that, could have been achieved by with different less vile means. I think its an authors responsibility when writing about marginalized groups they don't belong to to check themselves on if this story is really theirs to tell and if using these plot points is just exploitative instead of genuinely adding to the story or shedding light on what that group (in this case women and young girls) go through. 100% Jade did not need to be

sexually abused by her father when she was fucking 11. Taking it from general child abuse to the level of rape in a society where females are so disproportionatelyimpacted by rape culture isnt warranted by anything in this plot.

The book does have good bones. It offers interesting themes around stuff like self victimization, accountability, how society will vilify and refuse to help people who function on the outskirts of it, and so on. I like what the author was trying to do and succeeded in doing to a degree. I get what having a heart that is like a chainsaw means and i find it rather poetic. A lot of this book could have been rather poetic and beautifu. But the execution just went flat bordering into being offensive.

Content Warnings