Reviews tagging 'Pregnancy'

Sundial by Catriona Ward

71 reviews

reggiethebird's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.5

It's a thriller, alright. Vivid imagery throughout, and the plot twists and turns till the very last page. Plot twists can sometimes feel unearned, but I think here they were all reasonable, and nothing felt too out of place by the end.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Animal cruelty, Kidnapping, Gore, Infidelity, Miscarriage, Child abuse, Mental illness, Violence, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Toxic relationship, Addiction, Blood, Death of parent, Murder, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Animal death, Confinement, Death, and Trafficking

Moderate: Trafficking, Bullying, Gun violence, Self harm, and Vomit

_jaybee_'s review

dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

4.0

I'm a fan of Catriona Ward, and this book definitely has the same great writing and creepy-plot-with-heavy-nature-influences format as her other works. However, I nearly DNF'd around page 150 because it dragged when the flashback portion started and there were a couple of things that just weren't my personal taste/preference:

1) I usually love how she treats nature as its own character, but I have a personal vendetta against the desert after living there a few years 😂 so I was not enjoying reading about it.
2)There's also a plotline about

medical experiments with dogs

that was hard to read as an animal lover.

But overall still a well written book with 2-3 twists I hadn't anticipated so glad I finished it.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Animal death, Pregnancy, and Child abuse

bxnnny's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-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

4.0

another crazy ass book by catriona ward that i will be thinking about for a long time. if you've read the last house on needless street, you know how nutty her writing is, but it's such a ride. this book goes back and forth between the past and the present, slowly piecing everything together. it becomes pretty clear at a certain point the major, key details but how it all came to be might not be what you expect. i couldn't tear myself away from this one, i was just truly enthralled in this story. the ending will leave you much like how you might have felt at the end of inception. please keep in mind there are A LOT of heavy trigger warnings in this (mainly animal cruelty/abuse/death and domestic abuse but there's many more so please check them all). i likely wouldn't have read this if i didn't already know catriona ward's writing previously to prepare myself mentally or hadn't been so interested in the story to be willing to push through.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Addiction, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Drug abuse, Infidelity, Trafficking, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Miscarriage, Physical abuse, Child death, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Self harm, Suicide attempt, Toxic relationship, Gaslighting, Violence, and Pregnancy

antimony's review

dark mysterious tense

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

3.0

ok see . i really liked the past chapters and i liked the end a lot. but like. why was it set up the way it was? like a lot of present then a huge chunk of past interspersed with 2-page chapters of present then a lot of crazy stuff happening in the present plus the little excerpts from rob’s stories which serve us nothing at all. i wish the past and present chapters had been more dispersed from each other. and for the longest time i did not like callie or (present) rob. and i wish we’d had more time in the past i thought that part was quite interesting! also the unsettling desert vibes were simply not there.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Child abuse, and Domestic abuse

Moderate: Drug use, Mental illness, Pregnancy, and Infidelity

Minor: Miscarriage

racl's review

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

4.25

Heavy subject matter all around, but I really enjoyed the way the story unraveled, revealing the truth bit by bit in ways that never felt out of the blue. Every revelation feels right rather than done for shock value.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Blood, Domestic abuse, Gore, Medical trauma, Grief, Mental illness, Animal death, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Miscarriage, and Emotional abuse

Moderate: Confinement, Suicidal thoughts, Abandonment, Child abuse, Child death, Self harm, Pregnancy, and Infidelity

Minor: Drug abuse and Drug use

readingtomydogs's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.75

I liked when the chapters were short, some were quite long. I really enjoyed the dual timelines. The writing was very tense and I thought Rob’s backstory was very interesting, not like something I’ve read before. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Animal death, Animal cruelty, and Murder

Moderate: Miscarriage, Toxic relationship, Adult/minor relationship, Pregnancy, and Gore

elle_e_d_light's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Like Ward's other books, this book is DARK. If you are sensitive to animal cruelty or domestic abuse, you should probably stay far away from this book because it has both of those throughout the whole story. 

If I had to categorize this book, I'd say it best fits into Psychological Horror. Emphasis on the "horror". I won't say I enjoyed reading it—I hate animal cruelty—but I thought it was very well written and very good for the genre. I think I liked "Little Eve" a bit more than this, but that's because I loved the more gothic feel of it. I can't decide if I think this one is slightly better written. I liked "Little Eve" and "Sundial" far more than "Last House on Needless Street", which I didn't much care for. From the other reviews I've seen, it seems to be that the more someone likes "Needless Street", the less they like "Sundial" and vice versa.

While I thought this book was good, it's really not the type of book that one recommends to people. At least not without several content warnings. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Gaslighting, Infidelity, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Violence, Murder, Emotional abuse, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Drug abuse and Medical content

Minor: Pregnancy, Adult/minor relationship, Kidnapping, Miscarriage, and Trafficking

Part of the plot deals heavily with the MKUltra experiments—specifically the remote controlled dogs part. It was animal cruelty of the highest order. But anyway, the animal cruelty and testing in this book is based off of real-life events.

sunshinestark's review against another edition

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Pregnancy, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Domestic abuse, Animal death, Death, Emotional abuse, Grief, Physical abuse, Animal cruelty, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Infidelity, Miscarriage, Addiction, Child abuse, Murder, and Blood

kamreadsandrecs's review

dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

So I picked this up because I needed a bit of a break from the Pink Carnation reread I was doing, and what better to cleanse my brain than a horror novel right? So I fed a handful of picks through a randomizer, and Sundial was the one that popped up, so I settled in and got started.

And did any of you know it was possible for horror to have layers? BECAUSE THIS BOOK HAS LAYERS. IT IS A VERITABLE LAYER CAKE OF HORRORS. AN ONION EVEN. 

First layer - What it’s like being in an abusive relationship, and what it takes to survive in one, and then later, what it takes to escape from it.

Second layer - Learning that what you thought was your past, your history, was utterly untrue. This is utterly terrible because so much of what makes us who we are is our past. So if you find out that what you thought was your history is, in fact, untrue? That sort of thing is horrific - especially so when you learn that your ACTUAL history is nothing short of nightmarish.

Third layer - Learning that you were altered without your knowledge, and that it was done “for your benefit” and “for the benefit of the world.” First, imagine finding out that who you thought you are is NOT who you actually are, and then follow that up with the whammy of learning that you were ALTERED in order to, supposedly, keep yourself and everyone around you safe. Imagine not having this explained to you. Imagine not being ASKED if this is what you wanted. It was just DONE to you.

Fourth layer - Finding out that you may in fact be a monster - and that the monster inside of you might be coming out once more to destroy everything you love and care about.

Fifth layer - Looking at your own child, and wondering if the monster you harbored inside you is also in them, and that said monster is beginning to manifest. 

When I finished this novel I kind of stared at the ceiling of my room because WHAT IN THE ACTUAL EVERLOVING FUCK? What makes this even more powerful is that the above layers of horror are also twined around themes of siblinghood and motherhood: how it’s possible to love, hate, and even fear your siblings and/or your parents, and how parents can love, hate, and fear their own children.. Most media portrays the sibling and parent/child dynamic as straightforward, but this story really tackled the complexities and nuances of those relationships.

So overall, this book is an amazing, nightmarish read. The slow reveal of the utter horror of the truth at the heart of the story, the peeling back of all those layers of history were immense fun, especially backed by the themes of siblinghood and parenthood that formed the thematic backbone of the story overall. The twists were great too: I didn’t see them coming, but they also made sense in the overall context of the story. This was absolutely the cleanse my brain needed, and I’m also going to have to shovel more of Ward’s books onto my TBR, because this was INCREDIBLE.
 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Emotional abuse, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Physical abuse, Child abuse, Blood, Mental illness, Pregnancy, Child death, and Gore

dale1997's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Physical abuse, Animal cruelty, Domestic abuse, Child abuse, Child death, Blood, Violence, Pregnancy, Drug abuse, Addiction, Animal death, Toxic relationship, Confinement, and Emotional abuse