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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I still feel the way I felt when I posted one of my updates; this book is charming yet unsettling. The end was touching and made me sigh a get misty eyed.
"Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true for everybody."
--
"I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one in the whole wide world."
--
"I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one in the whole wide world."
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
This book was a little hard to get into for such a short book. The book is about unexplainable magic, kind of a dark fairy tail. This novel felt like a young adult novel with some adult themes thrown in, but we se it through a 7 year olds eyes, so most go over his head. I definitely had a Coralaine feel it.
lighthearted
fast-paced
Like typical Gaiman fashion, this one was strange. He always seems to make me feel like I’m on a bad acid trip to start and as the story unravels I feel like it just gets worse but instead while I’m coming back to reality and seeing the mess I made while out of my mind. This one was short and hard hitting, you travel back to a time when you feared monsters and knew all the secret hiding spots. It’s captivating and off putting at the same time. I enjoyed the subtle themes of childhood fears and how they perfectly intertwine with those you face in adulthood as well. The brokenness and hopelessness conveyed in this story is not something I’d expect from a 178 page book. Gaiman delivers on cringe worthy imagery that makes the kid in you want to cry and tell your parents but the adult in you suspicious and nervous. Overall, I think the contradictions offered, mixed with the unbelievable weirdness of the story and the uncomfortably Gaiman seems to provoke, even bordering on distressing, makes this a great read. Personally, I think the writing is superb and I found the story to be unconventionally eerie overall but I don’t know if I’d give this a top favorite standing for the fact is quite unrelateable overall. There’s a lot of individual themes to glean from this, which are wonderfully subtle and interesting to see how profound they can really be when analyzed, but overall it’s hard to stay too attached for the simple fact of it being such a strange and unbelievable story on the surface level. It has the effect of telling you a tale and when you reflect on what you have been told you can see the layers pertaining to the realness conveyed beneath. Again, superb in that standing and it’s very thought provoking but I don’t know if it would be for everyone unless you’re willing to dig for what’s personal to you.