Reviews with content warning for Bullying - The Goldfinch

Reviews tagging 'Bullying'

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

50 reviews

japanasi's review

shelving this as dnf for the time being, I’ll probably need to pick it up from scratch when I start reading it again because I doubt I will do so in the foreseeable future 😅 (not sure if ever tbh, it was super depressing and not what I had expected)

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oyasum1's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

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

3.75

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jazhandz's review against another edition

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DNF at 74%. Ordinarily that's so close to the end that I'd push through, but realizing that I still had 200 pages left, and that not that much had actually happened, and that I didn't really care about what had happened, and that whole pages would be filled with cultural references that felt too rich and bougie for me - I just couldn't hack it. I saw the movie a couple years ago and truly thank god I did because otherwise the writing style is so bloated that I wouldn't have been able to follow any of it. I know this book is probably someone's favorite, and I'm so happy for that person. I wanted to be that person. But if you don't like elaborate, flowery description, and deeply specific art references, then you might not like this book.

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nabila99's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.0

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holliesatchell's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

3.0

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exactlyem's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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rachelditty's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Picked this up after watching the movie with a friend. I downloaded the audiobook to listen to while I moved into my new apartment. Ended up listening to the last 9 hours in one sitting, and I was completely transfixed by the last two hours. Theo's address to the reader at the end really got to me, and I think this was a good story for me to read at this transitional stage in my early twenties. I definitely want to get a physical copy to put flags in. What a wonderful read.

Some quotes:
"Cool, quiet rooms, where old things slept."

"It occurred to me, that if I didn't already know how my mother had died, no power on Earth could have convinced me they hadn't murdered her."

"...standing up and stretching so that a band of stomach showed between his fatigues and ragged shirt, concave, dead white, like a starved saint's."

"More than anything, I was relieved that in my unfamiliar, babbling and wanting to talk state, I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thig I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street, which was, of course, I love you."

"My heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong."

"Well, let's put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?"

"To try to make some meaning out of this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase, Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there."

"And who knows? But maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey. A majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes his hands off our eyes, and says, 'look!'"

"Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important; whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair."

"And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them, while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the end of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next."

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