Reviews tagging 'Medical trauma'

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

26 reviews

lovealwaysadi's review

adventurous emotional mysterious fast-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? No

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Blood, Body horror, Classism, Colonisation, Death, Dysphoria, Pandemic/Epidemic, Racism, Xenophobia, Genocide, Gore, and Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Physical abuse and Violence

avisreadsandreads's review

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Body horror, Death, Gore, Pandemic/Epidemic, Violence, Xenophobia, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Murder, Child death, and Medical trauma

Moderate: Confinement, Colonisation, Self harm, Vomit, Dysphoria, and Torture

Minor: Fire/Fire injury

idun_aurora's review

challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious 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

5.0

A short but impactful read! I do enjoy a fantasy mystery. Great setting, great characters, just beautiful and emotional. The depiction of sibling relationships is touching and genuine, so much so I could almost hear my own baby sisters whining about eggplant in the food at times.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Body horror, Death, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Medical trauma, Dysphoria, Bullying, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, War, Abandonment, Grief, Medical content, Pandemic/Epidemic, Racism, and Xenophobia

ofbooksandechos's review against another edition

emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Medical content, and Child death

Moderate: Medical trauma, Xenophobia, Dysphoria, and Colonisation

Minor: Fire/Fire injury and Self harm

content warnings provided by the author: Medical racism Ethnically motivated violence Former colonization/empire Descriptions of a refugee/migration crisis Mentions of genocide Discussions/handling of a plague Child death Disordered eating behavior Mostly mild self-harm (for magic reasons) Body dysmorphia from gender dysphoria (and related medical transitions) Discussions of trauma, including past (childhood) physical abuse (for magic reasons) Implied child neglect Body horror and medical gore, including graphic descriptions of corpses

fareehareads's review against another edition

adventurous dark informative reflective tense fast-paced

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

4.0

Originally intended to be a short story exercise of medical fiction, the story of Fairuz and company transformed into something more. We follow a small family of Sassanian refugees fleeing the city of Dilmun where Sassanian blood magic practitioners are being persecuted (the queendom of Dilmun was an allegory for the Muslim conquest in Iran). Fairuz, their trans younger brother Parvaiz, mother, and recently adopted orphan named Afsoneh, try to find peace in the city of Qilwa which notoriously hates Sassanians. Fairuz meets a healer named Kofi who runs a clinic that helps people despite their refugee status or financial situation, and just when things seem to be going well, they discover a magical ailment infecting Qilwa called blood-bruising. Corpses begin to come in the local mortuary in odd states and Fairuz uses all of their medical and magical knowledge to figure out the cause & find a cure. 
For such a short piece of fiction, the world building in this book was immediately easy to pick up and felt quite grounded. The idea of environmental magic, blood magic, and structuralists had basic rules to function and limitations that wouldn't make any magic user all powerful.
The mentor and student relationship between Afsoneh, an untrained blood adept (magic user) and Fairuz an inexperienced teacher was so heartwarming. The difficulties Fairuz faced simply through lack of access and fear of something going terribly wrong were frustrating and so real. I felt for each of these characters so heavily. This book is heartwarming, raw, emotional, and at some points downright gruesome. If you don't like medical procedures or tons of blood, skip this one! But if you want to explore an extremely unique magic system and learn a bit about the refugee experience through fiction, this is the one for you.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Physical abuse, Medical trauma, Blood, and Self harm

Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Violence

theirgracegrace's review

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

4.25

A powerful and heart-wrenching debut from Naseem Jamnia. Firuz is trying to raise their family of refugees from a nearby country under military occupation in the free city of Qilwa. However, to make ends meet, they have to hide their blood magic abilities while working in the one free hospital in the city. As they do, they discover a mysterious plot is rising, and only blood magic could be to blame. An incredible story from a queer-normative world that really speaks to the southwest Asian immigrant experience. The twist is one I did not see coming in the slightest, and the ending gave me hope for the characters' broken world. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Dysphoria, Genocide, Child death, Colonisation, Death, Self harm, Torture, Body horror, Gaslighting, Medical trauma, Racism, Blood, Child abuse, Grief, Hate crime, Murder, Cultural appropriation, Medical content, War, Bullying, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, and Xenophobia

Moderate: Police brutality, Classism, and Religious bigotry

Minor: Vomit and Transphobia

nolemdaer's review against another edition

challenging medium-paced

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

2.25

The strength of this book was its worldbuilding: a thoughtfully-constructed world that is (as the synopsis says) queernormative but still rife with societal complexities. A major theme was migrancy and immigration, underlaid with a storyline about forbidden medical magic that lends the story its fantasy element. On this note, the book didn’t do anything wrong, per se—but the short length and repeated summarizing of several months into a paragraph or two made it hard to get very far beyond the acknowledgment and demonstration of inequity and oppression.

Ultimately, I didn’t find the characters particularly likable, which made it difficult to care much about them and thus the story. Firuz spent most of the time feeling guilty and spineless about something or the other, which did not endear me to them at all. (Also, apparently they're even more awkward on the page than at 1.75x speed in the audiobook—so perhaps it's good that I listened to this one.)

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Medical content, and Blood

Moderate: Dysphoria

jjjreads's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious sad slow-paced

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

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Cultural appropriation, Child abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Physical abuse, Terminal illness, Vomit, Dysphoria, Genocide, Hate crime, Bullying, Child death, Grief, War, Xenophobia, Gore, Death, Blood, Body horror, Self harm, Violence, Chronic illness, Classism, Colonisation, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Murder, Outing, Police brutality, and Racism

lbelow's review against another edition

emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense 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

4.75

This is a short read, but packed with so much complexity and nuance! It's the story of a refugee struggling to provide for their family and their people, but it's also the story of the daughter of immigrants who doesn't know her parents' native tongue and feels like she has something to prove, the story of a trans boy who struggles to make friends and who just wants to feel at home in his own body, the story of a man fighting against the dictates of a government paralyzed with the fear of being re-colonized by the refugees begging at their door—a man who will do anything to show that these refugees are people too and they deserve respect and fair medical treatment. A fantastic world, multi-faceted characters, an intriguing plot—this novella has it all! I can't wait to see what Mx. Jamnia writes next! 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Xenophobia, Medical trauma, Medical content, Death, Body horror, Injury/Injury detail, Terminal illness, Physical abuse, Dysphoria, Child death, and Blood

therainbowshelf's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-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? It's complicated

5.0

Refugee and blood magic user Firuz convinces a small clinic to take them on as an assistant during a pandemic, and they find themself in the midst of an unexpected underlying crisis. I really enjoyed this read, which I picked up because of #RainbowCrateBookBox. I liked the characters, and always enjoy finding queer-normative settings. The ending got intense but it was really good. Also loved the giant mushrooms.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Child death, Xenophobia, Blood, Racism, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail, Hate crime, Death, Dysphoria, Violence, Medical content, and Confinement