Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

Gone by Michael Grant

6 reviews

123urmom's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0


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villainessreads's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

My biggest gripe is how the characters of Edilio and Pete were handled. Quinn is openly and blatantly racist against Edilio and he's not really punished for it. He's still a "good guy" at the end. There's no narrative pushback for calling Edilio a slur like there is for Pete's slurs. I kept reading, but it never stopped being uncomfortable. I don't know how the author is normally a great ally and failed to see how horrible it would be for a PoC to read how Edilio was treated by the narrative. He's practically their housekeeper: cleans up their mess but never gets any narrative credit for his contributions. 

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0pen_b00ks's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5


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highcrisis's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

michael grant and k a applegate of animorphs fame on their first date
katherine applegate: i wonder if we have anything in common? for example, I love writing novels that contain extreme body horror and disturbing settings-
michael grant: omg for 12 year olds?
katherine applegate: omg yes for 12 year olds

content warnings: body horror, dead babies, bulimia, nuclear(?) mutations, gore, animal horror(?), opioid addiction, alcoholism, amputation, mass child graves, car crash

honestly the fact that I went from reading a grimdark adult fantasy to this and the tone barely changed at ALL??

fucked harder than when I read it as a kid. this book really shows you that you don't need to dumb writing down for kids, this shit was hard, the character motivations were great (like, these 14 year olds kids were complex!!), the mystery, the fantasy mystery, the gross body horror!! jeff vandermeer was taking NOTES when he wrote annihilation!

this book is better than most YA and middle grade fiction right now to be quick fucking honest! and also reinforces my opinion that kids books in the 2000s were better because there was no weird american puritanical bullshit insisting they had to insert ~moral learnings~ into the novel every few chapters. like, michael grant wrote a charming, manipulative asshole as the villain in this novel, and it fucking lands!

4.5 rounded up (4 bc it was a bit dicey towards the end, 5 bc it fucking slaps)

anyways book 2 lets go

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delphic's review against another edition

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too unnecessarily graphic, was interested in the main idea for the book but found the
the burnt body of a toddler, a girl lying on the road as her limbs turn gangrenous, the mention of babies dying and the description of binge eating
all a bit too much especially so early on and close together

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yashirolevi's review against another edition

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

3.0

oh, this one was really not for me. i can see the appeal with fans of the maze runner series, which also was not really my cup of tea. i don't think that the characters and the world was really flushed out to the extent that it could have within the first book and this just kept me really bored. there were many characters to keep track of and they did not feel like they were all under the age of fifteen. i'll read the next installment only because i, once again, bought it full price and i can't let that money just go to waste if i don't read that. i sure hope that i will have some kind of interest in the following book lol. 

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