Reviews

First Aide Medicine by Nicholaus Patnaude

smeejdeej's review against another edition

1.0

You can't convince me this wasn't written by an AI that was fed lines from emo and scene kid blog pages from back in 2005. This mess of prose is punctuated with drawings straight from kindergarten and nearly drove me to sleep with actively egregious and pretentious word choice. I have no idea how stuff like this finds publication, but the few clever and colorful phrasings could not make up for this 100-page slog, which is only ballooned to that length due to the numerous and needless cave drawing sketches. There is a certain flair to stream-of-consciousness writing which is achingly absent here. Reader beware, this is a novel that is antithetical to the "don't judge a book by its cover" proverb in that the beautiful wraparound cover is by far the best instance of art in this entire package.

stitchandwitch's review against another edition

2.0

I can see why so many reviews on this book, both here and on other sites, are relatively vague. It's a vague book. It's a hard one to pin down. It's metaphor, it's nonsense and it's poetry all in one. It is an interesting concept, and in places reminded me of Amelia Grey's "Threats" because it encapsulates a person going into insanity... either that or he ate some questionable mushrooms. Can't really tell. Unlike "Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" where the images carry you through a story, these rather simplistic drawings don't, in my opinion, do much for the story itself, but they are interesting at points. The cave drawings of a mad man, perhaps. I keep wanting to compare it to other books, but I can't think of a single book that can share its place in either genre or message. Worth the short time it took to read it. Not sure it will go down as a favorite, however.

meganmilks's review against another edition

4.0

The disorienting juxtaposition of a goth teen romance on the beach is just one of the ways in which this novel plays with the macabre. The narrator's morose angst is deadpanned by an author up to some tricks in this tragicomic tale of a suicide girl come back to haunt her boyfriend. The narrator's logic is aslant, uncanny, full of emotional volatility, his non sequiturs strange and strangening, his descriptions self-consciously, enjoyably grotesque.

Excerpt:
We don’t want her parents ever to see us. What time should I leave so as to completely avoid them? I’m not sure. They keep catching me. Sneaking up on me…even when they’re not there…even after our love lies braided with cobras and buried in Karen’s grave. The eagle with his eye hanging out by a goopy thread is the shadow of his own death, or so said Karen about her own life. I creep into the lampshade dawn to sell some sunglasses.