Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

5 reviews

remibaker's review

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

3.0

Good read. Pretty faced pace. Quite descriptive in the environment - it can be a bit overwhelming/confusing trying to keep track of everything going on, but I enjoyed the plot 
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ofbooksandechos's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
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booitsnathalie's review

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adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

A defiant scream into the universe; a refusal to become only pain, bodies without self; poetry born of love and death and comic spite. Hope is so hard to find in this bloodied, fragile existence, but it's there, beating at the bruises and concrete that could never bury us. Whispers turning to cries in defiance of anyone arrogant enough to think they get to choose when we die.
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wordylocks's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-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? Yes

4.5

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kaisermatthias's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Imagine that Michael Bay wrote an NC-17 action movie focused exclusively on the equisite suffering of eternal life gained by constantly killing a clone and waking up in a new, slightly degraded, body that required surgical reconstruction into a half-machine, always hurting horrorshow of an existence. Then imagine that you're plotting a heist, but to do so, you have to get together a group of personalities destabilized by centuries of trauma and mutual murder. Now, disassemble all the pieces of that narrative to a point that they cannot be followed except as a series of explosion-fuck-agonizing detail of a microsecond of pain rendered in pornographic detail-technobabble especially featuring the constant use of the attosecond as time marker-remembrance of love from a time long ago-smash cut to present-fuck you-fight scene. And you have the all-consuming world. 

If you're looking for action without reason, grit, gore, and more f-bombing than the Die Hard trilogy, head on in. 

I would love to see this as a TV show. It's written like media, and would absolutely shine as the skeleton of a script. As a novel? It's a bit of a slog. There's some really excellent writing that gets absolutely buried under repeteated phrasing, profanity-as-personality, and a steadfast refusal to explain anything about the world except how the current POV character suffers from the state of it. 
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