Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

3 reviews

m4rtt4's review against another edition

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

3.5

Like Overstory, this book also gave me so much to think about — what is important in life, what even is life? It was also highly emotional and gave an interesting insight on raising a child on the spectrum. This book had so much potential, but it aimed too high. There were so much interesting concepts like decoded neurofeedback and the whole near-future dystopian world with all its catastrophes; it's almost criminal of Powers to create such future scenarios and only mention them in a single sentence, a fleeting moment. I was very intrigued at first, but I lost my interest more and more towards the ending because I knew that I'd never get the explanations I wanted. In that way the story kind of stayed true to itself, though — just like me, we as a society will never know enough about this world and all our answers might be wrong. The ending was lame, it was too dramatic for no reason and the results weren't even properly dealt with.
the death of Robin was so unnecessary and didn't even give the story any emotional value as it was just quietly swept under the carpet — also you just can't end the book by him dying without even telling us the consequences?? just let him live, his death didn't even have the symbolic impact of 'we humans are doomed' as it probably was intended to.
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elliannasedona's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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annasophie's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad 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

2.5

2.5 stars – Oof I don’t know what to make of this book. Let me start by saying when Power’s writing is good, it is amazing. Overall however, this was mostly..boring? I find his characters usually very interesting but here they started to annoy me. I didn’t care for any of them, which for a predominantly character driven book is obviously bad; and having fictional, albeit very very obvious, stand-ins for Greta Thunberg and the President-who-should-not-be-named and other social media ‘influencers’ did not help. If you write a 13 year old Swiss climate activist at least give her a Swiss name not a Scandinavian one; how more obvious can you be? I found most of this book very annoying because everything seemed to repeat itself, even down to the sentences; different, but interchangeable throughout the entire length of the book. Maybe it would’ve been better off as a short story or maybe it’s just me being a picky reader but this really did not work for me.

A neutral observation: never did I think I would read the words ‘tofu scramble’ and ‘black salt to nutritional yeast ratio’ in a Powers novel, or any novel for that matter, but there’s a first for everything I guess so that’s fun. Btw, tofu scramble w/ black salt and nutritional yeast is delicious actually but make sure to add some onion, cumin, turmeric and ginger, splash of lemon juice and a tiny bit of sweetener too. Pro tip, I promise.
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