Reviews with content warning for Blood - The Dinner

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

The Dinner by Herman Koch

13 reviews

kaitidid's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

A nice, tense, unreliable narrator read. Had some uncomfortable undertones (racism, classism) that were definitely there to show what kind of people the characters were, but I’d caution against it if that will make you uncomfortable.

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j_schley's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

4.5

This book will leave you feeling profoundly unsettled and very disturbed. Yet, it was almost impossible for me to put down. There’s a pervasive and thick feeling of unease from the first page, and any opinions you form of characters or situations will not hold true by the novel’s conclusion.

If you enjoy unreliable narrators, moral ambiguity, and questions of ethics, this is absolutely a story you’ll want to pick up. It’s grimy and gritty and dark but provokes many questions about the mercurial nature of human morality and the tenuous bonds of dysfunctional families.

I also don’t advise reading this book while eating, despite its innocuous title.

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itsjustgrumpy's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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afabbi's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

The writing is great, the story is interesting and told from an interesting perspective, but the characters are bad people who don't have any development throughout the story

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torturedreadersdept's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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h4ppycupcake's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced

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

3.0

This read like a Dutch take on American Psycho. Not for the faint hearted. I didn’t find any of the characters particularly interesting and I didn’t end up feeling satisfied with how the story concluded. There was some interesting commentary regarding how society judges who can be considered an “innocent victim,” but it was not a pleasant character revelation. Truth be told, there were no pleasant parts of this book.

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noemi_qu's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

While I *do* like how the timeline was told/author chose how to reveal things, and that I sat a bit with the book as a whole for a good amount of time afterwards... but I still dislike this story.
No one in this book is redeemable and that's fine, they are written very well like that and leaves you uncomfortable on purpose.
At least for me, the climax and conclusion felt flat.

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