Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Discomfort of Evening

I should start by saying this book has a million trigger warnings - please check them out before picking up if you need to do so. I was shocked by the amount of gruesome and traumatic things that popped up in here and for someone who is fainter of heart I imagine this could be distressing.
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After their brother dies, Jas and her 2 remaining siblings experience grief in different (but equally unsettling) ways. Jas becomes anxious, compulsive, and submissive; Hanna becomes a pleasure and thrill seeker; Obbe becomes violent and sexually abusive. This book suggests the strange and varied ways grief can manifest itself in a cold and controlled environment, with emotionally unavailable parents and a fruitless and frigid landscape.
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What happens in this book is nothing short of fucked up. I thought I became somewhat desensitised to these sort of events but then something even more fucked up than the last thing would happen and my apparent comfort would be obliterated. I did not have a nice time reading this. I was uncomfortable about 80% of the time. It was certainly unique and perhaps I would return to it in a few years time - but I need the shock of not knowing anything about this before reading it to settle for a while.
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Amongst all the chaos there are some achingly true comments on grief and loss, my favourite, "Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn't want to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother."

Content Warnings

actualresultsmayvary's review

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

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

3.5

Historic
Rating and review from notebook

- Place in history is weird and hard to remember
- Very honest exploration of children's sexualities
- Narration feels genuinely childlike rather than childish
- Unreliable narrator
- Confusing time jumps
- Sad ambiguous ending with lots of unanswered questions
- Traumatic and disturbed but in a way that felt authentic and relatable

Content Warnings

oftheolivetree's review

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challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

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

1.0

The Discomfort of Evening touches on grief and the way families fall apart in a unique way. Jas, the main character, exemplifies how anxiety and obsessive tendencies develop following the experience of severe trauma, and how children often feel the need to be the glue that keeps their dying families together in the wake of tragedy. That being said, this book uses incredible violence, molestation, and incest, among other things, as shock value and excitement for readers who clearly have never experienced these things. Sexual abuse is romanticized heavily in this book and is described in heavy detail literally for no reason other than to shock the reader. Child molestation, incest, abuse, etc. adds nothing to the book and just feels like a perverse fantasy for creepy readers to get off to. It’s all discussed in such specific detail too. None of that needed to be in this book whatsoever, and it’s clear that this book is not for survivors in any way, especially with how the author writes children literally enjoying being molested. All of these things are in here just to be taboo. It is not a discussion of sexual trauma or violence in any regard. It romanticizes sexual violence and abuse. Don’t read this.

Content Warnings