Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - Manhunt

This was a challenging read, often quite upsetting. The writing style was a bit jarring at first. If you're in a place where you can stomach it I think it's a good read to help you examine your biases and internalized transmisogyny. I'm trans and there was still stuff in here that I was like oops didn't realize I'd internalized that gotta keep that in check. It's a heartbreaking gutwrenching book, Beth and Fran are messy and complicated and imperfect but my god do you just want these women to catch a fucking break.

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surprisebear's review against another edition

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I slogged through as much as I could, thinking I just wasn't used to horror writing. It's my least read genre. I decided to quit after I read the reviews, and even the positive reviews commented on the gruesome, gory writing. Definitely not for me, especially with the whiplash between scenes that are incredibly horny, and scenes that were the grossest, most wretched things I've ever read. Maybe there's something meaningful about gender that could be found, but I'm not willing to dig through the viscera for it

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argonautical's review

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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

0.5

This book wouldn’t know subtlety if it was beat over the head with it. The concept was solid so I stuck through it in hopes that maybe it would get better but I really should’ve called it quits after the first 20 pages.

There’s such a reliance on shock value that in the end nothing is shocking because you’re just numb to everything going on. A cycle of one gruesome thing happening and moving on to the next while waiting for some semblance of a plot to appear and it never does. Simultaneously the book thinks it’s so clever with its inclusion of modern gender politics into its post-apocalyptic dystopia but you can’t be clever when everything is presented at face value, no nuance to any characters, no depth, just a shallow portrayal of gender in which the villains of the book are caricatured in how one-dimensional their ideals are (there seriously wasn’t anything more creative to call them than TERFs? That is what they are but cmon, you had free rein to unleash creativity, call them anything, anything at all, and you chose the default option, in this a fictional world in which internet-origin lingo is gonna stick out like a sore thumb as feeling incredibly out of place).

There’s no commentary of value added by the author on the themes (if we can even call surface-level discussion that) she chose to include so it serves only as a preach to the choir instead of allowing any delving into what we could understand about our society’s treatment of trans people and gender identity as a whole through the lens of this world she created. An opportunity to say something of value absolutely wasted.

The blurb labels it horror while the acknowledgements labels it splattercore. It fails at horror given the thematics are so surface-level and shock-value driven with the same cheap shocks cycled over and over that it’s impossible to feel anything but bored. Despite the prevalence of violence it fails to be splattercore either because, again, I feel nothing. It’s like the author thinks just including various traumas inherently creates horror or dread but completely forgets how important it is to add a coherent story to the mix so that readers actually have something to care about. “This thing happened and then this thing happened” is not a compelling story.

There is no development to any character, and we learn very little about any of them. And yet instead of a plot we spend the whole time following random events involving these characters we don’t know enough about to care for, often in a confusing fashion of sudden perspective changes without proper indication of who we’re following now. All wrapped up in run on sentences and cluttered paragraphs that often make it a chore to parse what’s being written.

I spent 20¢ on this book secondhand and that was still too much.

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jojothefool's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

4.25

I really enjoyed this novel and had so much fun listening to it. I’m not a huge apocalyptic genre fan or like war heavy stuff so some parts of this were rough to get through or just not my cup of tea, but this will definitely stick with me for a while and I did enjoy myself. Heed the trigger warnings!!!!

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angelyn_ramos's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense fast-paced

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

3.5

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kaseyd's review

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funny tense medium-paced

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

3.5

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potato_bug's review

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dark emotional tense fast-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

5.0

Would not recommend to people who are even remotely transphobic. It's got some of the hardest things for a trans person to hear from TERFS and from the trans women in the book (I mean, it's the end of the world and the main source of estrogen is contained in ballsacks, the transgirls are going through it) (no excuse for TERFS). It's the end of the world and all persons with high levels of testosterone have turned feral. TERFS have seized the opportunity to hunt down all trans women and convert cis boys into their ranks as women. As Liam McBain says in a 2022 npr article: "the core horrors of the book [are]: the fear of not knowing what will happen to you when someone realizes you're trans, because they think trans people — trans women especially — already are monsters. The fear of a forced detransition, an irreversible one, that takes your entire personhood away. "

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