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3.91 AVERAGE
3.91 AVERAGE
I definitely liked it. But for all the excitement I heard about it before, I guess I was a bit underwhelmed.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
It's just giving me the ick, we keep giving characters backstories and I just don't care
this was awful in that it wasn’t at all pleasant, but it was definitely A Good Book™. the characters are well-written, if annoyingly self-aware, and the plot starts slow but quickly becomes relentless. it made me think of Dostoyevsky with the long social commentary monologues the characters would sometimes embark on (which, again like Dostoyevsky, readers in 200 years will need some serious context clues to understand). interestingly, secular writers (who in this day & age tend to claim humans are fundamentally good) often expose the evil in even the best-intentioned human hearts through books like these. while there are plenty of political explorations, this book is fundamentally about humans - our motives, our foibles, our pride and our struggles; how we interact with those who mistreat us, get in our way, or simply don’t take us seriously. I can’t say I would want to read it again, but I am glad I read it.
wow wow wow! this left me speechless and i will be thinking about it for a long time.
In an effort to clean up my TBR, despite having no recollection of where I’d even heard of this book, I gave it a try. Lit fic is not my usual genre and the long winded style of this was a bit tough to get into at first, but the characterizations really hooked me. The first ~270 pages are very little plot and a whole lot of inner monologues, which could be massively boring to some but IMO did such a thorough job of creating these people. On paper they have admirable goals but in reality are all seriously flawed, insecure, and wildly self-absorbed. They feel SO real and also awful. Meanwhile, the plot itself is very slow with a rapid crescendo at the very end. The ending was not satisfying from a plot perspective but it was poignant. Glad I read it!