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le3713's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
slow-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? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Kidnapping, Murder, Rape, and Gore
Moderate: Death, Child death, Suicide attempt, and Cancer
Minor: Fatphobia
sauvageloup's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Complicated feelings over this one
Pros:
- Rowling is an exceptional writer; the complicated but satisfying plot, the mixture of straightforward tone interspersed with moments of lyrical descriptions and reflection, the characterisation and development, the slowly eked out relationship development, the depth of every single side character, how each character's dialogue is made distinct and accents rendered realistically, the research that's clearly gone into it... just so much to admire in the actual writing and her skill.
- I like Robin and Strike and many of the other side characters. They feel real and Rowling puts across their emotions very well. There's a very real feeling of being as harried and pressured as Strike clearly is with everything piling up and then the release at the end.
- the plot was complex but wrapped up very neatly at the end. It was complicated by various characters' mixed motives but it didn't feel forced.
Cons:
- My only complaint about the writing was that it was *massively* confusing at the beginning. SO. MANY. NAMES. Got super confused. Also later on completely forgot who Joanna Hammond , which might be due to it being 3am right now, but still. Took the punch out of the revelation at the end because I couldn't remember who the hell they were talking about.
- Rowling's views... Rowling as a person... that was just in my head the whole time I was reading.
- her views then come through in this book, more than the others I think. This is the first book to come out post Rowling revealing herself as a massive transphobe and I think there's a lot of elements of that that come through in this.
- There's the killer, Creed, dressing up in women's clothes to lull his victims into a sense of security, which is the most transphobic bit. Then there's a good bit of fatphobia in there with obvious scorn and disgust angled towards fat people, including Creed being obese. A point I hated a lot was when it's made fun of that Irene has IBS. The condition is given to an already dislikeable character and it's encouraging the reader to laugh at her during that whole episode, which I thought was really cruel. No-one, however dislikeable, should be subject to mockery because of a chronic and painful medical condition. There were other bits too and I can't speak for disabled people but I wasn't sure how some of the portrayals of disabled people would come off to them. Then there's points where I felt that Rowling was hammering home other points, about women's safety, about Robin's rape, about domestic abuse, manipulative men, feminism, and about people who arguing for changing language rather than actually making a difference (the students Strike has a rant at in Max's flat over a so called 'slutwalk'). None of that was wrong, but I felt it linked back to Rowling's perception of herself within the world.
Anyway, the book was written excellently, but Rowling is a piece of shit. Unfortunately, I am also very jealous of her writing abilities and wish they'd been given to someone more worthy.
Pros:
- Rowling is an exceptional writer; the complicated but satisfying plot, the mixture of straightforward tone interspersed with moments of lyrical descriptions and reflection, the characterisation and development, the slowly eked out relationship development, the depth of every single side character, how each character's dialogue is made distinct and accents rendered realistically, the research that's clearly gone into it... just so much to admire in the actual writing and her skill.
- I like Robin and Strike and many of the other side characters. They feel real and Rowling puts across their emotions very well. There's a very real feeling of being as harried and pressured as Strike clearly is with everything piling up and then the release at the end.
- the plot was complex but wrapped up very neatly at the end. It was complicated by various characters' mixed motives but it didn't feel forced.
Cons:
- My only complaint about the writing was that it was *massively* confusing at the beginning. SO. MANY. NAMES. Got super confused. Also later on completely forgot who
- Rowling's views... Rowling as a person... that was just in my head the whole time I was reading.
- her views then come through in this book, more than the others I think. This is the first book to come out post Rowling revealing herself as a massive transphobe and I think there's a lot of elements of that that come through in this.
-
Anyway, the book was written excellently, but Rowling is a piece of shit. Unfortunately, I am also very jealous of her writing abilities and wish they'd been given to someone more worthy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Blood, Body horror, Cancer, Child abuse, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gore, Grief, Kidnapping, Mental illness, Murder, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Terminal illness, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, and Vomit
Moderate: Sexism and Misogyny
Minor: Abandonment, Abortion, Addiction, Chronic illness, Fatphobia, Forced institutionalization, Medical content, Medical trauma, Miscarriage, and Pregnancy
sefkhet's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Right, I own this because I'd paid for it on pre-order before JKR showed her transphobic ass to the degree she has done lately. I've offset this as much as I can by donating double the cost of the book to Mermaids.
I have read the whole thing, and I can say with confidence that it did not need to be 927 pages long. Indeed, I have tagged what otherwise would be a fairly fast-paced book as slow-paced because it did not need to be 927 pages long.
I will also say up front that the best character in the whole book is Wolfgang, the dog.
I've given it two stars because I like Strike and Robin, and because I think this has the fundamental building blocks of a story that would have been great in the hands of a different writer. I've liked Strike and Robin since The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read before anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. I was pleased when Robin got shot of Matthew midway through Lethal White (not least because three and a half books is quite long enough for any woman to haul a plot device around as if it's a small grenade), and although Robin's character development in this book is fairly predictable, it isn't entirely bad.
On the other hand, the regression of a number of the other long-standing women characters in the book in support of Robin's character development is teeth-grindingly awful. So far as Strike is concerned, Robin's chief asset has always been that she is Not Like Other Women, and that is a casually misogynist viewpoint that I'll forgive Strike on the grounds that the main person he tends to be comparing her to is his ex-fiancee. In the previous books, I've had no difficulty reading it as Strike's viewpoint, mainly because the previous books have featured women in the supporting cast who have not been written as stereotypes or as foils for Robin. Ilsa, Vanessa, and Linda have sacrificed their personalities in this book and I don't even know why.
The narrative is filled with casual bigotry -- against women, against fat people, against women of colour, against people with regional accents. The narrative is in third-person omniscient, so take from that what you will. When the narrative in the later Harry Potter books was full of holes, we forgave it because it was written from the point of view of a canonically oblivious teenage boy. She doesn't have that excuse here.
The transphobic dogwhistle of an A-plot that was the subject of so much of the advance publicity is pointless, given that it's entirely about the dangers of cisgender men rather than trans women. (I suspect the author sees neither the irony nor the nuance.) It didn't need to be included, and the story itself would have lost nothing at all and would have needed to be changed not at all if it had never been mentioned.And in the end, after spending half of the book and what feels like half my life on it, it isn't even the A-plot.
And that's without getting into the factual errors, the continuity errors, and the pages upon pages of fully transcribed interviews full of ellipses and difficult-to-read phonetically-spelled regional accents that just aren't needed.
The really disappointing thing is that the resolution to the murder is actually well set up and satisfying and creepy, but by the time we got to it I'm not sure I cared anymore. Also,for a series that is so quick to armchair diagnose psychosis, we definitely skip over the fact that even the most disinterested of armchair diagnosticians would have recognised that at least part of -- by no means all of, but still -- the murderer's motive is that she has Munchausen's by proxy.
I have read the whole thing, and I can say with confidence that it did not need to be 927 pages long. Indeed, I have tagged what otherwise would be a fairly fast-paced book as slow-paced because it did not need to be 927 pages long.
I will also say up front that the best character in the whole book is Wolfgang, the dog.
I've given it two stars because I like Strike and Robin, and because I think this has the fundamental building blocks of a story that would have been great in the hands of a different writer. I've liked Strike and Robin since The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read before anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. I was pleased when Robin got shot of Matthew midway through Lethal White (not least because three and a half books is quite long enough for any woman to haul a plot device around as if it's a small grenade), and although Robin's character development in this book is fairly predictable, it isn't entirely bad.
On the other hand, the regression of a number of the other long-standing women characters in the book in support of Robin's character development is teeth-grindingly awful. So far as Strike is concerned, Robin's chief asset has always been that she is Not Like Other Women, and that is a casually misogynist viewpoint that I'll forgive Strike on the grounds that the main person he tends to be comparing her to is his ex-fiancee. In the previous books, I've had no difficulty reading it as Strike's viewpoint, mainly because the previous books have featured women in the supporting cast who have not been written as stereotypes or as foils for Robin. Ilsa, Vanessa, and Linda have sacrificed their personalities in this book and I don't even know why.
The narrative is filled with casual bigotry -- against women, against fat people, against women of colour, against people with regional accents. The narrative is in third-person omniscient, so take from that what you will. When the narrative in the later Harry Potter books was full of holes, we forgave it because it was written from the point of view of a canonically oblivious teenage boy. She doesn't have that excuse here.
The transphobic dogwhistle of an A-plot that was the subject of so much of the advance publicity is pointless, given that it's entirely about the dangers of cisgender men rather than trans women. (I suspect the author sees neither the irony nor the nuance.) It didn't need to be included, and the story itself would have lost nothing at all and would have needed to be changed not at all if it had never been mentioned.
And that's without getting into the factual errors, the continuity errors, and the pages upon pages of fully transcribed interviews full of ellipses and difficult-to-read phonetically-spelled regional accents that just aren't needed.
The really disappointing thing is that the resolution to the murder is actually well set up and satisfying and creepy, but by the time we got to it I'm not sure I cared anymore. Also,
I find myself wondering what the BBC might do with this, when they get there. There's a lot of scope for them to tell it better.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape and Violence
Moderate: Transphobia, Sexism, Misogyny, and Fatphobia
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