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3.87 AVERAGE
3.87 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
tense
dark
emotional
medium-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
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Holy crap. This was so hard to finish but I HAD to know what happened! Seriously disturbing scenes in here.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, Drug abuse, Injury/Injury detail
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
As the story goes on, the narrative jumps between Eddie and Darlene, or, well, Eddie and "Scotty", which turns out to be a street name for crack cocaine. Yes indeed, half this book is narrated by a controlled substance. But that's actually pretty cool -- you can see how Darlene's thoughts are affected and pushed around by Scotty to become the thoughts that eventually win out or turn into speech.
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I had a tough time reading parts of this. Really tough.
And it wasn't because of obscure words or arcane syntax, either. One of the narrators is crack cocaine itself, and crack tends to keep the vocabulary and sentence structure pretty straightforward.
No, just be warned, if you read this very inventive and emotionally effective book, that some subject matter is really difficult, and the guy writes well, so it gets inside you.
I won't bore you with a summary - you can read the official one.
But if you can, read it. It's worth the effort.
And it wasn't because of obscure words or arcane syntax, either. One of the narrators is crack cocaine itself, and crack tends to keep the vocabulary and sentence structure pretty straightforward.
No, just be warned, if you read this very inventive and emotionally effective book, that some subject matter is really difficult, and the guy writes well, so it gets inside you.
I won't bore you with a summary - you can read the official one.
But if you can, read it. It's worth the effort.
An African American mom turns to crack after her husband's murder. She abandons her 11-yr-old son for the promise of plentiful drugs on a mysterious farm. Turns out she's signed up for modern-day slavery. And that's not the weird part. The chapters are told from 3 perspectives: the mom, the boy & crack itself, a disembodied voice that sounds like a cross between Huggy Bear & the devil. Fits, since it's basically a tour of hell & the demons that get us there. Haunting, inventive, racially-charged, but unrelentingly grim.
I liked the structure of this novel, which follows a man whose mother had disappeared when he was a young boy. He finds her, and joins her on the farm where she's working, which they eventually escape from. The way it moved back and forth in time worked really well. There was also a sly narrative trick that came into play - you think you know who the narrator is, but slowly it dawns on you that it's someone else. There are also some interesting changes in language for some of the characters. Overall I enjoyed this, possibly the writing a bit more than the story.
Why, she asked, if all these small things we do, all this work that gets dumped on us day after day, if all our love and our attachments mean absolutely nothing and everything will eventually get incinerated, why do we bother to do anything? Is there any reason to keep on living Is that why it's better to smoke our lives away, why oblivion and death seem to call to us continually, like they're summoning us home? How do we do it? How do we go on?
Really intense novel about blackness, racism, lynching, agricultural trafficking and slavery, addiction, and trauma, partially narrated by crack.