Reviews with content warning for Toxic friendship - Jackal

Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

faithfulgoddess87's review

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dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.0

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sjbshannon's review

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

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

4.75

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livlamentloathe's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

4.0

This was a great story about racism, lost girls, stories, and secrecy. I loved the split between Liz’s POV and the mysterious chapters about all the missing girls. It reminded me a bit of an Alex North novel. But I liked the messy nature of this. The way everything didn’t wrap up prettily and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions. But for once, not in a bad way. In a realism kind of way, where there’s clearly more coming for the characters of this world, but those details don’t matter or take away from what the reader experienced.

Infuriating! But in a well-written way. I hate white people so much. It’s unfortunate to be lumped in with such a defensive, intolerant race. Ugh and cops. ACAB forever. I think Mindhunter season 2 was the first time I truly recognized police inadequacy when bipoc lives are involved. When I was young, I really thought the duty of the police was to protect us. ALL of us!! I miss that level of naivety sometimes cause situations like that of Liz in this book scramble my whole brain. The way she saw things so clearly and the “justice” system can just decide “uh no actually.” I have so much privilege to even acknowledge this as if it’s still new to me. Autistically, I just fucking wish everything would stop and shut down and reboot better. That the system wasn’t built around inequality and instead cops would DO THEIR JOBS. And racism wasn’t learned or inherited but was actually as unlikely as white people expect it to be. I read this back to back with Bad Cree and the whole notion of “we have to do this cause the cops won’t” has been a big theme of the week.

It’s too bad Liz didn’t make a different decision at the end and go tear out the throats of the entire negligent racist police department.

Get wrecked, Doug.

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macleanbridie's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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dustghosts's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.75

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this— easy to devour and I found myself hanging on to the mystery. The writing style struck a strange balance between being too straightforward (telling not showing, as the phrase goes 🙄) and too vague, which left me a bit unsure at the beginning. The story and themes feel big, ambitious, like they are tackling a lot of different, lived aspects of classism, racism, and misogynoir at once— some more successfully than others. I actually quite liked the supernatural aspects, here— my only complaint being that I think the author could have left them more open-ended/vague, as I think what lets that part down is the same aspect I mentioned earlier (too clean to be unclear, too vague to be satisfying). This is a bit of a romp and appropriately troubling and thoughtprovoking throughout.

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