Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - Go as a River

Reviews tagging 'Drug abuse'

greatexpectations77's review

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

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

3.75

I have about 4K words of thoughts about this that are more appropriate for elsewhere, but I am absolutely baffled that other reviews didn't mention the fact that this book uses violence against a Native person to prompt personal growth from a white woman. Wil shows up, gets called slurs, has no characterization,

gets Tori pregnant, is vaguely magical, and then dies in less than 100 pages. He only exists to be pined for as like an ethereal being. He is written as essentially something other than human who also provided a baby.

it made me REALLY uncomfortable. Also, I felt like the end was a whole different story that got tacked on. I just cannot believe Read talked to Native folks before writing this book, as she states in her acknowledgements. Because I really feel like she just went and checked off all the tropes of writing about Native people in the kind of "magical Negro" trope. The character is there to further the story, but they're not really a full person. I'm just really mad about this. First time I've been burned by a blind date with a book. Sigh. The action kind of trickles out too.

Content Warnings

seventhswan's review

Go to review page

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

2.75

I can appreciate that Go as a River is a beautifully descriptive, thematically complex book that a lot of people will really enjoy, but despite seeing this logically, I didn't particularly like it. The first half of the story was tediously slow - I enjoyed the second half a lot more, but they felt like different books to me. I also found that a lot of nuance, depth, and sympathy was given to characters like Victoria's father and brother, while more interesting characters like Wil and Ruby-Alice were deprived of agency and left quite one-dimensional. Their portrayals didn't match with what Victoria claimed to feel about them. And, honestly, I just didn't care about or connect with Victoria that much even though she was objectively going through many difficult things. Pretty much every other character seemed to have a more interesting perspective on what was going on.

The descriptions of the book's setting and the changing time periods were the highlights of this story for me, and I did feel emotional in places purely because of the amounts of suffering various characters went through. However, everything wrapped up so neatly and relied on so many improbable coincidences that it was just not a book that really worked for me.

Content Warnings