Reviews with content warning for Religious bigotry - The Unworthy

Reviews tagging 'Religious bigotry'

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica

117 reviews

wtrac's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

a firestorm of a book. bazterrica captures and creates a world that is both familiar and not, a world within a world that is uninhabitable, that is poisonous, but poses itself as the only safe haven. the story moves quickly, in blinks, moving from one event to the next in a free flowing narrative that sucks you in with no escape. the cast, though limited, are vastly faceted, multi-sided dies of all the aspects of human nature. from the grotesque to the mundane to the innocent to the righteously furious to the resigned, there was not a piece of this book that didn’t hurt, and it hurt in the way it was meant to.

Content Warnings

chypepper_'s review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Content Warnings

natalie_pop's review against another edition

4.0

dark emotional fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Content Warnings

saintswitchblade's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I liked this book waaaaaay more than I liked The Vegetarian, which could be due to the subject matter or the translation or both. The writing is beautiful, the stylized narration is really immersion, and I found the story very engaging.

Content Warnings

gray's review against another edition

4.25

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

In a post-apocalyptic world where the climate crisis has ravaged the whole world, the main character is a survivor of the outside world who goes into the "Sacred Sisterhood", a convent-like institution filled with women (with the exception of Him) who are all segregated into the "Chosen Ones" (The Enlightened, the Full Aura, the Minor Saints, The Diaphanous Spirits), the Unworthy, and the servants.
As someone from the middle group, the main character is able to show her dislike towards the servants and her dream of becoming one of the Enlightened ones (never like the other Chosen Ones, as she never had the desire to be mutilated). However, her views start to change when a newcomer from the outside world joins the convent.
The book is written as journal entries, as the main character doesn't want to forget, probably pertaining to how she has completely forgotten all about her life outside the convent before she started writing her journal entries. But as the days go by, she starts recalling and relates her tale as well. It was probably due to shock and repressed trauma, and as she shares her story with the newcomer Lucia, she regains her memories.
There were so many threads that the story could have followed, and all of them had so much potential that I was kind of disappointed that I was able to predict the outcome of the book despite its secretive and mysterious nature.

Content Warnings

_deathcrush_'s review against another edition

5.0

dark mysterious sad fast-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

I loved this so much. I initially wanted to read it because I heard how brutal it was, but I didn't expect to love it. It is brutal and gut wrenching, but it's also beautiful, at least in my opinion. The only downside is that it can get repetitive, but I didn't really mind it.

Content Warnings

swordhearteds's review against another edition

2.0

dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

While this author is a clearly very talented writer, I felt like a lot of the concepts in this book we have seen before in recent years — The Handmaid's Tale and The Last of Us were two examples that kept coming to my mind — climate-induced apocalypse spurred into an endless dystopia with a heavy dash of twisted misogyny and religious cults. The way the story was told was in the style of forbidden diary entries of our main character, and I think the stylization alone was very gripping and fun just because some pages could cut off, it wasn't entirely linear storytelling, etc.

While the story itself was relatively engaging because of the fast pace, the style and the setting, the characters themselves were pretty formless beyond one or two character traits and by the end we still didn't know a lot about them. Honestly, I almost feel like this not-quite-novella could've been a short story instead. While the reader should have felt some relief that

the main character had effectively wrought the end of a horrifically abusive religious cult

, I found myself wondering what we were supposed to take away in the end, if anything.

I took off a full star for

on page murder of a cat and an unexpected on page rape scene

because I can and I hated that!

Content Warnings