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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
”The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event.”
This is a beautiful book. The beginning was slow and I couldn't get past the first two chapters, then starting from the third, it got so much better and that's when I started to binge read.
Don't get me wrong, I felt for the main character, Eilish since the start, but seeing the monstrosity from her eyes as the story proceeds and seeing how much she tried: it's moving.
“It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house...”
I felt part of the story. I rooted for the Stalk family with all of me. I felt the pain, the struggle, the grief, the feeling of helplessness, the fear and even the physical cold.
Each chapter just got better, culminating in the final three, which were excellent. The words hurt like knives. The final chapters, particularly, put things into perspective. This book makes you understand what really matters and that we should be grateful that we're safe and sound, with a roof on our heads and food on our tables. All things we take for granted.
“...And becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that had passed into folklore.”
The story in the book, although fictional, is the reality of millions of people everywhere in the world. The displacement, the pain, the loss.
This book should be taken as a wake up call. Not only to develop empathy towards the innocents suffering, but to open our eyes because if it happened in a modern day Republic of Ireland, it could happen anywhere.
Please, never let them take away democracy from you.
This is a beautiful book. The beginning was slow and I couldn't get past the first two chapters, then starting from the third, it got so much better and that's when I started to binge read.
Don't get me wrong, I felt for the main character, Eilish since the start, but seeing the monstrosity from her eyes as the story proceeds and seeing how much she tried: it's moving.
“It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house...”
I felt part of the story. I rooted for the Stalk family with all of me. I felt the pain, the struggle, the grief, the feeling of helplessness, the fear and even the physical cold.
Each chapter just got better, culminating in the final three, which were excellent. The words hurt like knives. The final chapters, particularly, put things into perspective. This book makes you understand what really matters and that we should be grateful that we're safe and sound, with a roof on our heads and food on our tables. All things we take for granted.
“...And becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that had passed into folklore.”
The story in the book, although fictional, is the reality of millions of people everywhere in the world. The displacement, the pain, the loss.
This book should be taken as a wake up call. Not only to develop empathy towards the innocents suffering, but to open our eyes because if it happened in a modern day Republic of Ireland, it could happen anywhere.
Please, never let them take away democracy from you.
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Tense and heartbreaking and tragic and real. Not one to read if you’re feeling fragile!
Found this a really disappointing read - I've read a lot of WW2 history and done research on asylum/immigration recently, and this felt like quite a shallow portrayal of a pertinent issue, one that a lot of writers of diaspora are covering in a more engaging, nuanced way.
For a slow build totalitarian dystopia, having the story only cover the fall of a country and end before its major point, that of immigration and empathy, means a lot of the most interesting issues arent even covered. We never learn about this nebulous totalitarian state, how it rose, or why the Irish public would engage in its maintenance - nor do we learn much about resistance. It's more a dystopia in a horror-sense - we know that it's bad, and we see how this bad affects a nuclear family, but we are left out of the macro issues of how these things occur and how we can solve them.
When we have so much brilliant literature about diaspora, asylum, immigration, war in Europe, war globally, I don't know what this adds to the wider discussion, outside of placing the issue closer to home.
For a slow build totalitarian dystopia, having the story only cover the fall of a country and end before its major point, that of immigration and empathy, means a lot of the most interesting issues arent even covered. We never learn about this nebulous totalitarian state, how it rose, or why the Irish public would engage in its maintenance - nor do we learn much about resistance. It's more a dystopia in a horror-sense - we know that it's bad, and we see how this bad affects a nuclear family, but we are left out of the macro issues of how these things occur and how we can solve them.
When we have so much brilliant literature about diaspora, asylum, immigration, war in Europe, war globally, I don't know what this adds to the wider discussion, outside of placing the issue closer to home.
This book is more relevant than ever, with conflicts such as that in Gaza and Ukraine being a heartbreaking piece of evening news to be watched before settling into watching the new Netflix series with a piping hot takeaway. This book doesn't allow you to look away, doesn't allow unrealistically happy endings - it is unflinchingly real. As Eilish struggles to hold her gradually disintegrating family together in the face of her father's Alzheimers, her husbands arrest and potential murder and her son's militant opposition to the regime the reality of a single woman fighting a seemingly omnipotent regime come to life.
Never at any point did I feel it was fair to judge her decision not to leave earlier - as she herself points out not only was it unrealistic with her son's passport but it's also a criticism made with the benefit of hindsight and shames those who have grown with the land for not wanting to abandon their country and their home. The ending is especially important given the surge of extremist anti-immigration rhetoric in the UK. For the splintered family there is eventually no choice but to escape the darkness, to take the hugely dangerous choice to escape through the sea and hope that such a risk will give her children any chance of survival and freedom. This book does not allow you to dehumanise those who have no choice but to stay and no choice but to flee. Every single person on a boat, taking the riskiest journey of their lifetime, is a human being with a story and a family who simply wish for freedom.
The only reason this book isn't rated five stars is that the lack of speech marks, paragraphs and separated dialogue made it extremely confusing to figure out what was actually spoken and who was delivering the line. As such the book flows less smoothly and requires an extra layer of concentration simply to figure out who is speaking. Nevertheless despite this small criticism the following of my favourite quotes from the book highlight why this book won the Booker Prize in 2023:
---> "The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."
---> "If you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing."
---> "History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who 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."
---> "Words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life."
Never at any point did I feel it was fair to judge her decision not to leave earlier - as she herself points out not only was it unrealistic with her son's passport but it's also a criticism made with the benefit of hindsight and shames those who have grown with the land for not wanting to abandon their country and their home. The ending is especially important given the surge of extremist anti-immigration rhetoric in the UK. For the splintered family there is eventually no choice but to escape the darkness, to take the hugely dangerous choice to escape through the sea and hope that such a risk will give her children any chance of survival and freedom. This book does not allow you to dehumanise those who have no choice but to stay and no choice but to flee. Every single person on a boat, taking the riskiest journey of their lifetime, is a human being with a story and a family who simply wish for freedom.
The only reason this book isn't rated five stars is that the lack of speech marks, paragraphs and separated dialogue made it extremely confusing to figure out what was actually spoken and who was delivering the line. As such the book flows less smoothly and requires an extra layer of concentration simply to figure out who is speaking. Nevertheless despite this small criticism the following of my favourite quotes from the book highlight why this book won the Booker Prize in 2023:
---> "The prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."
---> "If you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing."
---> "History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who 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."
---> "Words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life."