Reviews tagging 'Alcohol'

Wranglestone by Darren Charlton

3 reviews

axel_p's review

adventurous dark emotional hopeful fast-paced

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

3.0

The beginning kinda sucked, but after that it was amazing.

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Content Warnings

Minor: Physical abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Stalking, Alcohol, Domestic abuse, Gaslighting, Xenophobia, Cannibalism, Child death, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Child abuse, Gore, Gun violence, Body horror, Murder, Pandemic/Epidemic, Slavery, Blood, Death, Excrement, Grief, Sexual violence, Trafficking, Confinement, Violence, and Pedophilia

numerous_bees's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

2.0

I try to go easier when reviewing YA books - I'm not the target audience - so I'm not going pick on the themes for being heavy handed or the writing for being clumy or the characters for being and acting like teenagers. Those aren't faults but a quirk of genre, but this novel didn't work for me structurally. 

The first issue I ran into was that the author uses a lot of similes in an attempt to create a voice for the character and I found them be distracting and occasionally inappropriate for the situation.

The second thing - the one that really turned me off - is the sudden slavery/sexual assault plot point that shows up at about the 75% mark, lingers for a couple of chapters, and is dropped and barely brought up again. The sex abuse in particular is completely out of left-field, totally uncalled for, and adds nothing. I'm of the opinion that something that serious needs to justify it's presence in a story, and this didn't. 

The racism metaphor that followed the slavery plot point only served to highlight the lack of racial diversity in the cast. 

Finally, the climax is emotionally hobbled by how little we see of Peter and Cooper's community - the main(?) villain gets an emotional monologue where they try to justify their decisions, but they'vebarely featured in the story to this point and, despite Peter waxing poetic about how many happy memories they had together, we didn't see those events and Peter hadn't thought about them until that point, and I simply didn't care about this character or their motivations. 

It's a shame, because I think that the concept of a queer romance novel set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse has a lot of potential, but this book isn't really that. It starts off as a romance but ends as a survival adventure, and I don't think it did a good job of transitioning between the two genres. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Murder, Pandemic/Epidemic, Racism, Slavery, Trafficking, and Xenophobia

Moderate: Animal death, Blood, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Rape, and Sexual assault

Minor: Alcohol, Child abuse, Death of parent, and Physical abuse

seren's review

adventurous hopeful tense medium-paced

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

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death and Gun violence

Moderate: Alcohol, Body shaming, Death of parent, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, and War

Minor: Terminal illness