Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore

4 reviews

lopeared's review

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emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.0

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discarded_dust_jacket's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful mysterious slow-paced

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

3.5

What worked: the thing I’m discovering about Anna-Marie McLemore is that their use of language can be so disarmingly beautiful—like I’ll read a sentence and audibly gasp—but not in a way that feels inaccessible. I’m not looking up every other word or anything, I’ll just think to myself: “what a lovely way to phrase that!”

As someone who is neurodivergent and non-binary myself, I also really identified with a lot of the descriptions of both Bastián’s ADHD and just the overall discussions of gender from both Bastián and Lore’s perspectives. There were so many times that I highlighted things just because it felt like I was reading something that had been taken out of my own brain.

(I’ve also never read a book where dyslexia was described so thoroughly, which I found really helpful because I know very little about how that feels for a person living with it.)

I appreciated that this was a story about accepting the parts of yourself that you wish you could expel. If you’re someone like me, who makes a habit of ruminating on all your bad days or moments, and allowing them to convince you that you’re irredeemable, then you will absolutely resonate with Bastián and Lore.

But what makes this story so powerful is that it reminds those of us with brains we have to put effort into working with, that our bad days are part of us too, and that doesn’t make us any less worthy of love.

“So many of us are haunted by versions of ourselves we wish we could exile. But the pieces of our beings don’t pull apart that easily. If we try to unweave ourselves, we unravel at the edges. So we all do the work of reconciling who we are now with the ghosts we once were.”

It also highlights, quite powerfully, how the bad thoughts and emotions that we attempt to suppress will only reinsert themselves with more force the more we refuse to deal with them.

Now here’s what didn’t work (for me): I struggled with the jumps between chapters more than a few times. The chapters are relatively short—sometimes less than a page long—which is not a problem at all, but the thing is, between chapters the story often jumps rather abruptly, and it wouldn’t be clear how much, if any, time had passed. You wouldn’t be sure if it was just a horizontal jump through space but not time (just a perspective shift from one character to another) or if you jumped forward in time as well.

The second big thing is the pacing lagged. I’d say for a large chunk of the middle part of the story, it didn’t feel like very much was happening and it got repetitive.

The chapters started to feel like “open with ‘the thing about living with ADHD is…’, maybe interact with friends or adults, then the world floods, colors everywhere, Lore/Bastián encounter one another mid-flood, the water recedes, rinse, repeat,” until finally around the 65/70% mark new things started happening and I felt reengaged.

I hope that doesn’t sound overly critical or put anyone off. Like I said, the language and the descriptions are lovely, and I think the book has a ton of value, especially for neurodivergent people and the folks who love them. Plus it has a ton of important commentary about racism (one really powerful quote that stuck out to me, was “I’m brown, and trans, and I have a learning disability. My sheer existence is as much nuance as I get to have. Who I am uses up all the space the world is willing to give me, and even that, I have to fight to keep open. I am already a living confrontation. My story doesn’t get to be complicated.”)

It’s a message that I think bears repeating again and again:

“Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.”

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caseythereader's review

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emotional hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

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

4.25

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oliverreeds's review

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adventurous emotional hopeful 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

3.75

i fought with this rating and im still unsure in my decision but im sticking with it for now. the dialogue was good, the scenes were great, the mix of lake and reality and the characters were phenomenal. sometimes i just got a bit frustrated with how much the author leaned on adhd and dyslexia for these characters. it sometimes felt like there wasnt anything else to them and maybe that was the point— that your brainscape makes up and defines your reality but i think it may have been better to also focus on things the characters do that werent particularly relevant to their neurodivergency.

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