Reviews with content warning for Violence - Prophet Song

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

edward_eb's review

dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

I was really gripped by this book. Very pertinent to the terrible events happening all over the world today. And at its heart a book about family and love and the things people will do to keep what feels most familiar and safe, sometimes at a deadly cost. At points it was almost too sad and frustrating but absolutely worth the read and well crafted. It lends itself to audiobook very well too.

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l1ndz7's review

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5.0

This book was incredibly moving, devastating and completely reminiscent of world affairs. As the war was brought closer to Eilish’s family, it reminded me more and more of the occupation in Palestine and that the events that take place in this book have happened and are happening in places around the world right now. This is reality, maybe a far off reality to the West, but real nonetheless.

Normally, a book with huge paragraphs and no quotation marks would have been a DNF immediately (sorry not sorry Sally Rooney) but the writing was so poetic and urgent, I couldn’t stop reading. Yes, this took me months to read but it shook me and I had to put it down and read something else at times because it was so intense.

I listened to an interview of Paul Lynch shortly after writing this and watching that solidified Paul as an auto-buy author. He said that the writing structure was intentional and was meant to keep you in the moment and not just sympathize but empathize with Eilish. He also said that this novel explores the complexity of situations like this and make you realize how hard it is to leave everything you know. Once you read this, you will no longer say when asked questions like, “would you have left immediately when the Holocaust happened?” that you would. It’s never as easy it seems trying to escape something that you’re blind to and have very little knowledge about. Paul intended this novel to “decondition” us and I think he did so brilliantly. In addition, it also explores the problem with denial and how it’s useful to have until it’s not and if you deny long enough it ends up making everything worse.

What a fantastic novel. Well done, Paul Lynch 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

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10tlgibs's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense fast-paced

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

4.75

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gvstyris's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

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

3.5

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those that did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.

Although Prophet Song is a somewhat unconvincing dystopia, it is undeniably a hauntingly relevant chronicle of the migrant crisis. Lynch successfully flips Western apathy on its head by depicting the gradual erosion of law and order in a totalitarian Ireland; an ambitious yet admirable premise.

I struggled a lot with Lynch's stylistic choices, particularly the absence of paragraph breaks. While the stream of consciousness creates the intended tone of claustrophobia and panic, it is difficult to digest and made reading this quite a slog. I was more successful with the audiobook, although I really can't understand why it has a male narrator...?

That being said, I also think it's important to acknowledge that this book probably wasn't intended for me. I'm honestly too young to relate to Eilish's sacrifice and love for her children, and found that I learned more (about the refugee crisis and writing dystopia respectively) from As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow and The Handmaid's Tale.

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