Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
So very interesting and intriguing - more so because it's a young adult book with such adult themes (very well and sensitively executed though).
Many parts of this book about slavery during the Revolutionary War were hard to read, but I loved the style and the many deep-thinking, introspective moments.
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I loved MT Anderson's "Feed," so I wanted to love this book too. Unfortunately, I couldn't even finish it. The language is archaic, which, since it is set in Revolutionary times, is understandable, but I felt that the language was contrived and over the top, rather than realistic. Parts of the book were good, and certainly the story is intriguing, but in the end, I dreaded picking it up and just didn't care enough to finish it. What a disappointment.
I truly don’t think this book belongs in the teen section of the library. It is too difficult and graphic for most of the readers who browse there.
If you want to know what this is about read some of the other reviews, especially the one I marked as liked.
How did I feel about the book?
I despised the first section: The Transit of Venus
I was enlightened by the second, The Pox Party, particularly this quote:
"...I fear that one thing shall remain. When I peer into the reaches of the most distant futurity, I fear that even in some unseen epoch when there are colonies even upon the moon itself, there shall still be gatherings like this, where the young, blinded by privilege, shall dance and giggle and compare their poxy lesions."
I found the third, Liberty & Property, confusing as it is written from several completely different points of view from the other sections. Also it is about war battles, never a favorite subject for me.
And the final section, The Great Chain of Being, was piercing and painful.
At the end of the book my thoughts are that freedom isn’t free and humanity is inhumane.
I give it a 2.5 to a 3 because the writing and theme were amazing, but I really didn't like the book.
If you want to know what this is about read some of the other reviews, especially the one I marked as liked.
How did I feel about the book?
I despised the first section: The Transit of Venus
I was enlightened by the second, The Pox Party, particularly this quote:
"...I fear that one thing shall remain. When I peer into the reaches of the most distant futurity, I fear that even in some unseen epoch when there are colonies even upon the moon itself, there shall still be gatherings like this, where the young, blinded by privilege, shall dance and giggle and compare their poxy lesions."
I found the third, Liberty & Property, confusing as it is written from several completely different points of view from the other sections. Also it is about war battles, never a favorite subject for me.
And the final section, The Great Chain of Being, was piercing and painful.
At the end of the book my thoughts are that freedom isn’t free and humanity is inhumane.
I give it a 2.5 to a 3 because the writing and theme were amazing, but I really didn't like the book.
I may have given this book a better review if I had read it instead of listened to the audio. The old fashioned style became very obnoxious by the end and the third person narrations were disjointed and hard to follow. Just didn't translate well.
This book is really hard to get into and the beginning is really slow. I thought the ideas express were original and thought provoking, but I didn't feel drawn to the characters until the very last few chapters.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Incredible book. Very intense and takes a while to get through because you really have to pay attention to everything.
They told me of substance and form; they told me of matter, of its consistency as a fluxion of minute, swarming atomies, as Democritus had writ; they told me of shape and essence; they told me of the motion of light, that it was the constant expenditure of particles flying off the surfaces of things; they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver’s mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. [...] And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.What a weird, weird book. Genius, but consummately bizarre.
This novel is a katabasis.
The word katabasis, Ancient Greek κατάβασις, from κατὰ (down) + βαίνω (go), refers to a descent of some sort. It can be used to describe a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast, a military retreat, a movement downhill, the sinking of the winds or sunset—or, perhaps most famously, a descent into hell:
Facilis descensus Averno:Imagine a coming of age story. Then imagine the opposite of it. Simplistically speaking, this novel is a slave narrative, but an incredibly weird one, blinking in and out of various genres and influences, perhaps most notably flirting with turning into a Gothic novel. It also crosses paths with contemporary heroic literature of the American Revolution. It's also, technically, a YA novel? It's less of a coherent genre-novel than a smearing of all the paint across all the canvas, polluting each genre with each other genre and such, gleefully flinging the weirdest sorts of pathos at the audience in a way that, somehow, actually works. It's also a horror story—existential horror, almost Lovecraftian in its sense of scope; of course, also tethered tangibly to the Real, which only makes it all the more horrifying. The first part of the novel narrows in on the existential horror of slavery—the degradation of being owned, of being treated as a thing or a farm animal instead of a person, of being something other than human—while the rest of it plunges headfirst into the gory, nasty underbelly. Octavian's early life is relatively comfortable (apart from the existential horror of being a science experiment, of course), which serves to strip away all the "distractions," in a sense, leaving only the terror of not being in control of your identity and personhood. Then, once that has been solidly established, the genre switches again and all the other evils of slavery come sweeping into the narrative in full force.
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.
The first half of the narrative teases at an almost Camus-esque existentialism and Orwellian surveillance horror. The majuscule-G Gothic novel is also incredibly present; after all, the novel has all the hallmarks: an ancient, wealthy, possibly haunted (by the dead or the living) house; isolation from the outside world; convoluted, unhealthy, erotic power dynamics; a hidden room forbidden to the narrator which conceals a dark secret... to say nothing of Octavian's role as the quintessential unreliable narrator. The novel asks unanswerable questions, posits insolvable puzzles, creates inescapable situations, and is overall an absolutely bizarre rollercoaster of a thriller. It's a mindfuck disguised as a fucking YA novel. It's a katabasis.
I really liked Feed, and apparently M.T. Anderson isn't a one-hit wonder. Yay.