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joliefolie 's review for:
The Incendiaries
by R.O. Kwon
I read this book as an atheist Asian American woman who played classical piano competitively in childhood and abandoned it right before entering college. Not merely as a career path, but altogether, all at once; and for reasons similar to Phoebe’s. The mirroring of events to my real life experience (minus the family tragedy) was eerie.
There are some things Kwon got right about this - the quasi spiritual loss, the atrophied discipline - and others that I personally find unlikely. A young adult who grew up communing with an instrument for six hours a day is necessarily comfortable with solitude. Also accordingly, she lacks the skill set and personality type to fall into the sort of hedonistic social life that we are meant to believe Phoebe did, at least right away. As such, Phoebe’s character never read entirely real to me - her charisma felt constructed, to create an object of fascination for Will - and that annoyed me.
Upon finishing the book, I find my favourite aspect to be the gradual revelation of exactly how flawed and problematic Will was, how unreliable his narration. The story is ostensibly about a girl joining a cult, and the fact that random women tended to be afraid of the “good guy” narrator was deliciously overlooked for most of it.
I found the prose to be involving at first, then rather irritating, then easier to overlook as the end approached.
There are some things Kwon got right about this - the quasi spiritual loss, the atrophied discipline - and others that I personally find unlikely. A young adult who grew up communing with an instrument for six hours a day is necessarily comfortable with solitude. Also accordingly, she lacks the skill set and personality type to fall into the sort of hedonistic social life that we are meant to believe Phoebe did, at least right away. As such, Phoebe’s character never read entirely real to me - her charisma felt constructed, to create an object of fascination for Will - and that annoyed me.
Upon finishing the book, I find my favourite aspect to be the gradual revelation of exactly how flawed and problematic Will was, how unreliable his narration. The story is ostensibly about a girl joining a cult, and the fact that random women tended to be afraid of the “good guy” narrator was deliciously overlooked for most of it.
I found the prose to be involving at first, then rather irritating, then easier to overlook as the end approached.