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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
That was a ton of build-up for what ended up being a really underwhelming end. The book could've been much stronger if it was shorter, or if it was kept from the reader that Daisy wasn't really pregnant. I found the story to be really predictable and it dropped elements I thought were interesting. Like what was actually going on with the cysts from the stings? It felt like that was going somewhere and then it never did.
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
God this was fucked up on so many levels
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Infertility, Miscarriage, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Medical content, Kidnapping, Medical trauma, Abortion, Murder, Pregnancy, Toxic friendship
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Eating disorder, Gore, Infertility, Miscarriage, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Toxic relationship, Violence, Kidnapping, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Pregnancy
This book was hard for me to read in big chunks as someone forced to grow up in the Pentecostal religion. Everything in this book was a tribute to the religious trauma and its detrimental effects many people in multiple generations have felt.
Daisy aka Dee-Dee, struggles with her sense of self due to her strict upbringing in the Pentecostal church. Dee-Dee is in an unhealthy relationship with an ex-con, Daddy, but when Dee-Dee’s childhood friend comes back into her life, things take a turn for the worse, and Dee-Dee struggles to remain in reality while simultaneously obsessing over the past.
Deliver Me is an ominous page-turner that showcases religious trauma, obsession, jealousy, and rage. Nash can make you despise every character on one page, and the next, you’re sympathizing with them. This novel starts as a slow burn, but as the book progresses, the intensity picks up, and I couldn’t put it down.
Merged review:
This book was hard for me to read in big chunks as someone forced to grow up in the Pentecostal religion. Everything in this book was a tribute to the religious trauma and its detrimental effects many people in multiple generations have felt.
Daisy aka Dee-Dee, struggles with her sense of self due to her strict upbringing in the Pentecostal church. Dee-Dee is in an unhealthy relationship with an ex-con, Daddy, but when Dee-Dee’s childhood friend comes back into her life, things take a turn for the worse, and Dee-Dee struggles to remain in reality while simultaneously obsessing over the past.
Deliver Me is an ominous page-turner that showcases religious trauma, obsession, jealousy, and rage. Nash can make you despise every character on one page, and the next, you’re sympathizing with them. This novel starts as a slow burn, but as the book progresses, the intensity picks up, and I couldn’t put it down.
Daisy aka Dee-Dee, struggles with her sense of self due to her strict upbringing in the Pentecostal church. Dee-Dee is in an unhealthy relationship with an ex-con, Daddy, but when Dee-Dee’s childhood friend comes back into her life, things take a turn for the worse, and Dee-Dee struggles to remain in reality while simultaneously obsessing over the past.
Deliver Me is an ominous page-turner that showcases religious trauma, obsession, jealousy, and rage. Nash can make you despise every character on one page, and the next, you’re sympathizing with them. This novel starts as a slow burn, but as the book progresses, the intensity picks up, and I couldn’t put it down.
Merged review:
This book was hard for me to read in big chunks as someone forced to grow up in the Pentecostal religion. Everything in this book was a tribute to the religious trauma and its detrimental effects many people in multiple generations have felt.
Daisy aka Dee-Dee, struggles with her sense of self due to her strict upbringing in the Pentecostal church. Dee-Dee is in an unhealthy relationship with an ex-con, Daddy, but when Dee-Dee’s childhood friend comes back into her life, things take a turn for the worse, and Dee-Dee struggles to remain in reality while simultaneously obsessing over the past.
Deliver Me is an ominous page-turner that showcases religious trauma, obsession, jealousy, and rage. Nash can make you despise every character on one page, and the next, you’re sympathizing with them. This novel starts as a slow burn, but as the book progresses, the intensity picks up, and I couldn’t put it down.
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
sad
tense
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Fantastic. I’ve been picking away at this one for a while and I think it was best consumed very slowly - it gave me more time to turn over the characters in my head, seeing as (in my opinion) they were the focal point of the novel. My thoughts are almost a bit disjointed due to the long period of reading, but I always had a through line with the main cast because their personalities were all so solid.
I’ve been searching in books/media for something similar to this novel for a while. That is, a novel with an unapologetically strange, complex, and at times terrible female lead. I felt like a lot of other novels fall short when it comes to this representation: it feels like they flinch away from making their leads reprehensible and messy, because there’s a fear that they won’t be likeable or sympathetic. Daisy was certainly, at times, a diabolical person, but I found it interesting how I was weirdly compelled to root for her. Through her POV, a weird nagging part of me wanted her to have a baby, because she so desperately wanted it.
Her relationship with Daddy was also as equally as complex. I always much prefer a relationship depicting two broken, strange individuals rather than a conventional one. The author definitely takes full advantage of their toxic push-and-pull dynamic, and it ends up being the thing that shoves the plot forward, much to my (positive!) surprise. Not to mention, their sex scenes felt like character moments exposing parts of them both and the nature of their relationship, instead of reductive.
Daddy as a character himself was extremely interesting to me given his general mystique, his realistic yet oppositional takes, and the way his masculinity teetered due to his underlying vulnerability. A part of me almost wishes I had seen more of him but I know part of his allure is that he was always lingering at the edge of the picture, never entirely present.
I could see the ending coming from mile away but not in a sense that it felt like it ‘ruined’ the book. It just felt like a simple inevitability once you began to grasp who Daisy was as a person. I didn’t mind knowing what she was going to do, because how she was going to get to that state was the significant part. The journey was ludicrous and disgusting and perfect, like some literary car crash I couldn’t help but keep reading because some part of me was heavily invested in each moving part.
I think I’ll need another read to dig in more fully on the religious themes and to decide if they are surface level or not. The hypocrisy of the church is prevalent in the novel, but I hope there is a bit more to that than what I’ve been interpreting. The character of Sloane is also somewhat of a mystery to me, and her secrets may be revealed on a second read. I think I mostly felt impartial to her apparent ‘normalness’ when such intense personalities were coexisting alongside her.
Great read, and now I’m on the lookout for similar stuff. It really itched an empty spot I’ve been looking to fill for a long while now.
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-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
that was fucked up (non derogatory)
Deliver Me is one of those books that I would struggle to describe or recommend, and upon finishing it I felt that some of the events feel like a fever dream. The fact that it can be so heartbreaking & real one moment and then so gruesome and visceral to the point I felt uncomfortable is a testament to Elle Nash's incredible writing. If you're a fan of Ethel Cain, I would definitely recommend picking this up.