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sageypants's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
This was a pretty frustrating read. Another review here explains all my irritations pretty succinctly but to summarize:
I was interested in the premise and the exploration of different characters’ responses to a forgiveness act but the storytelling is empty and distant. So much more is told than shown. Entire scenes where a conversation between two characters could delve into their perspectives and reactions are often skipped with one sentence. For example, Willie meets up with a guy she’s interested in after spending a day at the archives looking for information. Instead of letting the dialogue unfold between them to either show her reluctance to get into it or her inability to keep her feelings from spilling out, we get a simple, “She told him about what she found.” This is constant through the entire book and ends up making it extremely difficult to connect to these characters. Interactions are brief and almost robotic. Characters feel more like they’re reciting a script than actually responding to each other. For a story with such intense subject matter, there is no intensity.
Even the main emotional plot involving Willie and her father’s business (which honestly felt more like a side story than the catalyst driving the actions of the main character) gets wrapped up with a pretty bow in a very very brief passage near the end after I’d nearly forgotten about it while she was learning about her family. I kind of wish Hank was dropped entirely and the focus was kept on the family — the business could still be in believable trouble without a Disney villain-like Hank there, and his random evil plot to frame the sub-contractors?? It felt as if it was aimed at children the way it got magically resolved in a few paragraphs by them magically finding this information at the end…
I also did not feel grounded in any specific time, it was difficult to get a grasp on the political atmosphere and how it had gotten to this point of forgiveness, but I will admit I was not very engaged when the president was giving speeches. They read to me like the empty platitudes of today’s politicians and it became very repetitive when the story would stop to update us on the progress of the act’s passing…
I did not know Maura Cheeks was a journalist before I picked this up nor was I aware this was her debut novel, but I am not surprised and I do agree that these issues likely stem from the way she’s used to writing.
I also think that for a book claiming to represent the reactions of different people in the family, the choice to mainly focus on Willie and Paloma is a weak one. Willie is a biased person… she’s literally personal friends/acquaintances with the imaginary president who passes the act, and Paloma is only a child. While both of those perspectives are interesting and have things to offer, i wanted to hear much more from Willie’s parents who had their own differing opinions on the act.
Last thing I’ll touch on since this is mostly an audiobook issue: I think what made this such a struggle to get through and may also have impacted my interpretation of the writing as flat in tone was the narration. It was very monotonous and only had variation for certain characters like Marcus when he was very upset.
As a general conclusion, I don’t mean to rag on this book too hard. It was a debut and it was tackling a pretty ambitious speculation of what would happen in this situation but through a very small scope. I believe there were a lot of great ideas here and a lot of great potential, but the execution fell very flat and ended up making this feel more like a draft than a complete story. I hope to see her writing keep evolving though in the future.
I was interested in the premise and the exploration of different characters’ responses to a forgiveness act but the storytelling is empty and distant. So much more is told than shown. Entire scenes where a conversation between two characters could delve into their perspectives and reactions are often skipped with one sentence. For example, Willie meets up with a guy she’s interested in after spending a day at the archives looking for information. Instead of letting the dialogue unfold between them to either show her reluctance to get into it or her inability to keep her feelings from spilling out, we get a simple, “She told him about what she found.” This is constant through the entire book and ends up making it extremely difficult to connect to these characters. Interactions are brief and almost robotic. Characters feel more like they’re reciting a script than actually responding to each other. For a story with such intense subject matter, there is no intensity.
Even the main emotional plot involving Willie and her father’s business (which honestly felt more like a side story than the catalyst driving the actions of the main character) gets wrapped up with a pretty bow in a very very brief passage near the end after I’d nearly forgotten about it while she was learning about her family. I kind of wish Hank was dropped entirely and the focus was kept on the family — the business could still be in believable trouble without a Disney villain-like Hank there, and his random evil plot to frame the sub-contractors?? It felt as if it was aimed at children the way it got magically resolved in a few paragraphs by them magically finding this information at the end…
I also did not feel grounded in any specific time, it was difficult to get a grasp on the political atmosphere and how it had gotten to this point of forgiveness, but I will admit I was not very engaged when the president was giving speeches. They read to me like the empty platitudes of today’s politicians and it became very repetitive when the story would stop to update us on the progress of the act’s passing…
I did not know Maura Cheeks was a journalist before I picked this up nor was I aware this was her debut novel, but I am not surprised and I do agree that these issues likely stem from the way she’s used to writing.
I also think that for a book claiming to represent the reactions of different people in the family, the choice to mainly focus on Willie and Paloma is a weak one. Willie is a biased person… she’s literally personal friends/acquaintances with the imaginary president who passes the act, and Paloma is only a child. While both of those perspectives are interesting and have things to offer, i wanted to hear much more from Willie’s parents who had their own differing opinions on the act.
Last thing I’ll touch on since this is mostly an audiobook issue: I think what made this such a struggle to get through and may also have impacted my interpretation of the writing as flat in tone was the narration. It was very monotonous and only had variation for certain characters like Marcus when he was very upset.
As a general conclusion, I don’t mean to rag on this book too hard. It was a debut and it was tackling a pretty ambitious speculation of what would happen in this situation but through a very small scope. I believe there were a lot of great ideas here and a lot of great potential, but the execution fell very flat and ended up making this feel more like a draft than a complete story. I hope to see her writing keep evolving though in the future.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual violence, Hate crime, Physical abuse, and Racism
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