Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Penance

The rare book where I am hooked by the premise, and then completely sold after the first page. I didn't want to look away while also feeling revulsion for the characters and their awful awful ways. God, how I do not miss being a teenage girl. I thought this was an effective commentary on the true crime fandom, as well as those Tumblr girlies who obsess over real serial killers. This book is graphic, infuriating, scary, repulsive, and addicting. Both a rebuke of the true crime genre and sort of a perfect example how you can create this type of gripping story without exploiting real people and their tragedies. As someone who fell off of true crime simply because of how slimy it made me feel consuming the grief of real people, this was the book that gave me everything I wanted and spoke to some of my own feelings.

Eliza Clark is now an author who I will read anything she writes.

Content Warnings

ginagray's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

arianaf's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense medium-paced

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

4.25

This is a fiction book presented as a non-fiction true-crime story, written by this writer/journalist that, at the lowest point of his career, moves to a small sea-side town, to investigate the murder of a teenage girl who was kidnapped, tortured and set on fire by three of her classmates. The plot is interesting and intriguing, and it offers some strong social commentaries, mainly on society's growing obsession with true-crime. Although, I really enjoyed reading this, it has a few minor drawbacks imo. In some occasions, the slang used by certain characters doesn't seem right for the time period the story is set. Additionally, the author explores in great detail a lot of sub-themes that are not that meaningful to the main plot, making it a little longer than necessary, and that can throw some people off (but this didn't bother me, personally, that much tbh).

Content Warnings

roie_23's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

There was a large chunk of this towards the end that I could feel myself enjoying it less and less. We were spending too much time in stories that I didn’t find necessarily important or crucial to understanding the lead up to the murder, but that final chapter flipped the switch and wrapped everything up in a perfect bow.

To introduce this fictional author at the very beginning as potentially untrustworthy and then to spend a full 400 more pages in the mind of this author and his self proclaimed sensitivity to the people affected by this awful crime makes you wonder when that other show is going to drop. Is he actually untrustworthy or was he actually swept up in a controversy that he had nothing to do with. And there’s signs throughout the final few chapters that Alec is losing the plot a little, like the comment about Heather wearing a full face of makeup even though she made it evident she thought he was disgusting.

Absolutely obsessed. A brilliant critique on the True Crime genre.

Content Warnings

rhona_m's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark reflective medium-paced

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

4.0

The structure of the book was a great way of revealing the characters slowly and through different lenses. The darkness of the story was less interesting than the portrait of the young girls featured. The relationship between these relatively normal highschool girls and how the oddities and experiences of each fuelled something dark. It felt like a believable progression rather than a narrative of plain evil.

Content Warnings

phenixbradley's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-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

Content Warnings

More...