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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
sad
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:
Complicated
This book was hard for me to enjoy, but I also feel like I really liked it. Or wait. Maybe I hated it. Or maybe I just did not know what was going on. It was interesting and different. It is a heavy subject matter and I think I am not sure what the authors ultimate point of the book was, so I really am not sure how to feel about it. I think maybe it is about redemption and opportunity, but through a dark lens with little hope... maybe a realistic attitude.
Anyway, I am puzzled by how I feel about this book. I guess I would recommend it. This might be good for a book club.
Anyway, I am puzzled by how I feel about this book. I guess I would recommend it. This might be good for a book club.
If you are at all squeamish, you won't like this book. It took me a couple of chapters to get used to the language and coarse life of Anais, but much like her namesake, she is brilliant and well worth sticking with.
A beautifully dark and searing tale of life at the harsher end of a modern civilised nation.
However as a fellow Scot I wisnae taken by the odd use of Scottish in dialogue and probably would have preferred either more or none at all.
However as a fellow Scot I wisnae taken by the odd use of Scottish in dialogue and probably would have preferred either more or none at all.
The voice of the protagonist and narrator, 15 year old Anais Hendricks, is the strength of this novel. She's smart, fierce, and funny as she cuts a destructive (and self-destructive) swath through foster homes, detention centers, and anywhere else she happens to be. When she ends up at the Panopticon, a home for troubled youths, she's nearing the end of whatever slack she might get as a juvenile, as she is lately suspected of putting a police officer in a coma. What's less apparent to the authorities is her basic decency, her loyalty, her intelligence, her hunger for love and acceptance, and her mental illness. Anais believes she is the product of an experiment, and that her experimenters watch her at all times, cataloging her behavior and trying to provoke her to worse crimes in order to put her away for good. Anais has spent her life in the care of the state, and the state has failed her miserably in every way it possibly could. Fagan's novel is a scathing indictment of the foster system, although it extends to almost anyone in authority—almost every adult in the novel—with the exception perhaps of a couple of social workers at the Panopticon. My one complaint is that it wraps up too fast, with little actual resolution. Fagan puts Anais through a late harrowing climax, but the aftermath felt too rushed to actually deal with the experience. Besides that, I found it a compelling, troubling book.
Written in the first-person of a Scottish teen who had had an incredibly horrible life as a ward of the state, this book was hard to read in two ways: the subject matter and the dialect. About 65 pages in, it became too much for me, but I certainly came away with a respect for Fagan's writing.
This book was outstanding and unflinching - hard to read at times but in a good, gut wrenching way. Can't stop thinking about it so I'll definitely be writing a longer review at Slatebreakers
What a fantastic book. I read Luckenbooth a few years ago, loved its powerful, hallucinatory quality, and was keen to read more of Jenni Fagan’s work. I don’t know why, but I had it in my head that The Panopticon was going to have a similar gothic otherness to it. I was soon disabused of this. The Panopticon is an unflinching, but so tender and delicate, tale of navigating a life without apparent hope, and building your own magic to survive.
Anais is fifteen and has spent her life in care. She’s forever in trouble, with an endless list of charges against her - theft, vandalism, assault – and has now, possibly, burned all her boats with a suspected attack on a police officer. If she’s found guilty, she will be detained until she is 18 and the statistics show that after this there is little chance of a “normal life”.
Anais is fifteen and has spent her life in care. She’s forever in trouble, with an endless list of charges against her - theft, vandalism, assault – and has now, possibly, burned all her boats with a suspected attack on a police officer. If she’s found guilty, she will be detained until she is 18 and the statistics show that after this there is little chance of a “normal life”.
As she waits in The Panopticon, she starts to bond with some of the other residents who observe and identify to some degree with the damage they can see inside each other. This is a social services accommodation, not a prison, so they are free to come and go before curfew. Some engage in hazardous sex work, all continue their substance abuse, increasing their sense of disjoint from society. The service workers supporting them struggle to penetrate their hard shells of scar tissue, and to make real human contact, contact which the residents often crave – to be seen as a person, not a problem.
Fagan’s writing is wonderful and vivid. She summons joy and horror with a few perfectly chosen words and evokes the Scottish dialect with sparing phonetics. This is pure witchery – one word in an entire sentence and you experience the full cadence of a voice, speaking directly to you.
It’s not an easy read, but it‘s an enthralling and rewarding one. Anais’ milieu is not enticing, but the peer pressure and the hopelessness make it hard to disclaim when you’ve been immersed in it all your life, and any other kind of life looks completely unattainable.
I knew what I was getting into...so I focused on the beautiful parts. The accents. The character development. The description of the world created by a broken brain.