Reviews with content warning for Emotional abuse - Our Share of Night: A Novel

Reviews tagging 'Emotional abuse'

Our Share of Night: A Novel by Mariana Enríquez, Megan McDowell

76 reviews

muertango's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious 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

4.0

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danielakalexandra's review against another edition

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adventurous 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? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

I think that I went in to this book a little too overhyped, and that affected the reading experience and the rating.

There was a lot that I liked in the book. I liked the connections to real events. I liked that you got the story from a lot of characters point of view, and in my experience it didn’t make the story hard to follow. I liked the language and that the story stretched over years.

That said, it was very wordy and a bit unsatisfying to finish. A lot of threads that never really made a sweater, and the parts that I liked the best were the ones that didn’t really evolve in a way I would have enjoyed. This may sound harsh, but I’m not sure what the point of the story is now when I’m finished with it.

In many ways an interesting and certainly different read, that left me with a little bit of an “meh”-feeling in the end

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danikajoan's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-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

5.0

This blew me away. I didn’t want it to end, loved the writing/translation (was already a fan of Enriquez from Things We Lost in the Fire), felt fully invested in the lore and so compelled by the characters. Really intense, a little eerie, sad, romantic, and funny.

and I am ALWAYS on board for a “house is bigger on the inside than the outside” House of Leaves vibe.

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alicia_rausch's review

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dark emotional slow-paced

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

4.5

This was an extremely difficult book to rate for me - and felt akin to Donna Tartt's work in which I must shelve them as "masterpieces I kind of hated reading yet I can't stop thinking about them."

The world, the characters, and the tone of the novel is masterfully done, though it remained much lighter on horror than I expected and the pacing was extremely slow. I found myself wanting to quit this beast multiple times and yet I’m glad I pushed through. I think, a bit like Vampires of El Norte, it was marketed as heavier on the horror than it was - and I was expecting a much larger % of the novel to be action, when in reality it was just a few sequences.

What it is, is a generational drama with horror elements, which should have been how it was advertised. It’s a quiet book, with a creeping sense of dread, and dark elements as we follow the family and how the cult affects each member over time. Like a darker, more effed-up Pachinko.

The rep for LGBTQ+ was well done, and like Pachinko, I greatly enjoyed the historical elements about a time period (and place) I am not overly familiar with.

The actual writing/storytelling was excellent and the way the puzzle fit together at the end was satisfying. I love an ambigious ending so that was a plus for me. But I just could not get past the excruciatingly slow pacing.

To the right reader, this will be an instant favorite - unfortunately, that reader is just not me.

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tamarant4's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced

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

4.0

'There are parts of a lot of people here.' It wasn’t Adela who had said that, though someone had used her voice. Who was speaking through her? [p. 297]

This is a long and extraordinarily dense novel, sometimes rambling, sometimes horribly precise and specific: but at the heart is the relationship between Juan and his son Gaspar. Juan is a medium, the only person who can manifest the entity known as the Darkness. This appears as a 'black light' which can sever human flesh instantly and cleanly -- though not painlessly. It is worshipped and kept secret by the Order, an international occult conspiracy. The Order's wealthy leaders dwell in a remote corner of Argentina, complicit with the dictatorship which keeps them supplied with sacrificial victims. Juan's wife Rosario was killed by the Order: Juan expected to be able to speak to her ghost, but cannot. (I learnt that there's no word in Spanish for haunting, so he has to say it in English: 'not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt'.) The Order and Juan both believe that Gaspar has inherited Juan's gift: the Order want to ensure that they control the boy, and Juan will do anything to keep him safe and out of the Order's hands. Because the Order's plans for Gaspar (and for Juan) are too frightful to be countenanced.

Enríquez' horror often focusses on disassembled, dehumanised body parts (a severed arm, a row of torsos, a box full of eyelids) and I think that 'The Zañartú Pit' (a chapter focussing on an investigative journalist recording stories about the disappeared and about the excavation of a mass grave) helped me to think about that choice: about the appalling volume of human remains left by the dictatorship, about bodies left to rot into pieces rather than being given death rites, about the anonymity of bones and limbs and organs. In Our Share of Night, human life is very cheap -- and it is a commodity, a requirement for the rituals with the Darkness and for the oppression by the dictatorship.

I was reminded of Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen, though that is set in an imaginary, and more Central than South American, country: the elements of the fantastic in that novel feel somehow safer because not rooted in reality and in the author's own experience.

Fulfils the ‘at least four different POV’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. (Juan, Gaspar, Dr Bradford, Tali, Pablo ...)

Fulfils the ‘multiple timelines’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

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