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A review by edgwareviabank
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
dark
sad
medium-paced
2.75
I'm having a hard time rating this book, because it's unlike anything I've ever read before. The verdict, in short, is I didn't enjoy it at all. It was a slog to read. Half of the time, I wasn't quite sure I was getting it.
I think the readers who are more likely to enjoy this are people who, like the protagonist, are Extremely Online. I'm not quite that. I'm sure there are lots of references I missed, and that contributed to my feeling of reading something way out of my league. That became exhausting quite fast. The whole first half of the book felt like that; when more emotional and relatable moments came up in the second part, the side of my brain that found the deliberate obscurity of nearly every sentence infuriating was already beyond silencing. The further I got, the more I found myself skimming over some of the short bursts of third-person narration. And with one of the points of the book (possibly) being that a life lived predominantly online robs the mind of focus on things that matter and have meaning...well, that's ironic, isn't it?
3 stars usually go to books I have at least mildly enjoyed, but 2 stars is what I'd give a book I find poorly written, and that's not the case here. Patricia Lockwood's use of language is, in fact, quite brilliant. Some of her images would make very good poetry. So I don't want all the negatives I found to take away from the fact I do believe the author is a skilled writer: this particular kind of nonconventional narrative was just really, really, really not for me.
I think the readers who are more likely to enjoy this are people who, like the protagonist, are Extremely Online. I'm not quite that. I'm sure there are lots of references I missed, and that contributed to my feeling of reading something way out of my league. That became exhausting quite fast. The whole first half of the book felt like that; when more emotional and relatable moments came up in the second part, the side of my brain that found the deliberate obscurity of nearly every sentence infuriating was already beyond silencing. The further I got, the more I found myself skimming over some of the short bursts of third-person narration. And with one of the points of the book (possibly) being that a life lived predominantly online robs the mind of focus on things that matter and have meaning...well, that's ironic, isn't it?
3 stars usually go to books I have at least mildly enjoyed, but 2 stars is what I'd give a book I find poorly written, and that's not the case here. Patricia Lockwood's use of language is, in fact, quite brilliant. Some of her images would make very good poetry. So I don't want all the negatives I found to take away from the fact I do believe the author is a skilled writer: this particular kind of nonconventional narrative was just really, really, really not for me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death and Grief