Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

1 review

reebeee's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark 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

3.25

Interesting concept, tense and engaging plot, excellently described fight scenes, effective (though occasionally predictable) twists, and smart references to classical texts. The main character is lovable and interesting—I loved her feral, rage-filled energy—but the narrative suffers from Most Special Girl syndrome. There aren’t really any other female characters who can rival Lore for determination, intellect, or ability (except for Athena which is…complicated). 

Similarly, while the novel tries to make some feminist statements about Greek myth and the present day, the narrative keeps accidentally undermining them: women are consistently unreliable,
(they’re dead, or they’re overly emotional and crazy, or they’re backstabbing, or they’re manipulators who will pretend to care about you and offer you wisdom but actually are the root cause of all your problems),
the people Lore can and should trust are generally men, and the divine patriarchy (i.e. Zeus
and Apollo
) is upheld as an ultimate and reliable authority. My objection is not that I think all men should be depicted as untrustworthy and all women as reliable, but rather that I would like to have seen one mortal female character ally herself with Lore who doesn’t seem like a last-minute, flatly characterized attempt to add a woman into the mix. 

The beginning was mostly clunky explosion and info-dumping, and the ending was somewhat abrupt, though it did create a satisfying end to the characters’ development. 

And, though it’s not likely to bother anyone else, the book has a fundamental misunderstanding of how oaths work in oath-reliant societies:
an oath means you will be held to the thing you swore an oath to do, whether or not you meant it when you swore the oath. Oathbreaking is one of the most serious legal offenses in societies that rely heavily on contractual oaths (e.g. medieval England, presumably the hunters’ culture in this book) and came with the assumption that the oathbreaker would be punished to the full extent of the law if caught and, whether or not they were caught, punished by divine justice. This of course doesn’t mean much in societies whose legal systems are not predicated on the assumption of divine justice, but for the hunters, whose society REVOLVES around gods, breaking an oath would presumably come with divine consequences—and the narrative keeps insisting upon Zeus as the ultimate holder of authority and control over the rebel gods. All this rant to say, Athena should NOT have been able to say “lol jk about that oath” without seeing some sort of narrative consequences for it.


In conclusion, an entertaining read with some characterization flaws and some cracks in its overall message. Athena is my fave.
insert that reddit meme (https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/countmalvolio/615892667435483136?source=share) about Macbeth: 
“Athena did nothing wrong. Prove me wrong” 
“Brutally killing Lore’s entire family was pretty over the top.” 
“No it wasn’t”
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
More...