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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
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
Waste of my time and makes me wonder how it ever got published.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
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
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Death of parent
Moderate: Animal death, Rape, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Slavery, Toxic relationship, Grief, Suicide attempt, Murder, Abandonment
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Pedophilia
medium-paced
Southern Gothic-style novels are kind of my new thing, and queer southern gothic novels even more so.
An absolutely gorgeous novel with prose written with the care and deliberate pacing of poetry. Capote's eye for sumptuous and ruined imagery rewards re-reading, solidifying the sense of overgrowth and stagnation that dooms everyone in the novel. It was an inspired and cruel decision to set a story about youth and self-discovery in a town and a house that permanently claims its residents, people whose attempts at escape always fail, whose homes and bodies become a kind of purgatory or a sentence. Pitting these kind of odds against a child looking for a way forward makes his eventual triumph that much more gratifying.
mysterious
slow-paced
I loved the prose in this book, and the Southern Gothic themes were hauntingly beautiful. The descriptions of the muggy summer heat, buzzing mosquitos, and opulent but dilapidated rooms had me feeling like I could really experience the environment, and it was interesting to see how that created an unsettling feeling for the reader (aka me). However, the plot sometimes felt a little lackluster, seemingly jumping from one event to another without much of a driving force that was leading us somewhere. It's also unclear to me where the climax of the story was meant to fall; the sudden reveal from Randolph felt unexpected and underwhelming, and then the eventual conclusion of the book didn't seem to relate very clearly to the main theme of the book, which was Joel's desire to be loved. Overall though, the experience of reading this book was quite lovely and interesting, and I'm curious to see if rereading it at some point will make more of the plot-related choices make sense to me.
dark
emotional
sad
tense
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:
Complicated