Review by not_another_ana - What I'd Rather Not Think About

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not_another_ana 's review for:

What I'd Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

1.25

challenging dark reflective 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

I'm either too much or too little. I'm terrible at dispensing the right dose of myself.

After the narrator's twin brother has died by suicide, she looks back on their childhood, their toxic relationship, and her brother's mental health struggles as an adult to try and cope with her grief in a series of choppy, clumsy vignettes that almost bored me and gave me a terrible idea of Dutch society. It's just so incredibly dull, like no wonder the guy jumped into a river.

By having the story reduced to short quick scenes, there was never any way to connect with the twin brother, and since what we saw of him was always from the perspective of the narrator and her issues with him there was no way to establish any sort of connection to him so when he died I felt nothing except good riddance. The narrator is a multitude of neuroses inside a sweater and thus also difficult to empathize with, hell no one around her ever came across as an actual real human being, there's robots with more personality. For a book about grief it was so cold and removed of any feeling.

Not content with being tedious and monotonous, the author added references to serious topics and proceeded to spectacularly mishandle them. There are repeated mentions to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi war criminal who performed horrific experiments on prisoners, that go nowhere and come off as callous. I thought that perhaps the narrator was going to make some sort of connection between Mengele and his torture of twins with the death of her brother, but that only gets mentioned one time, the rest of the time it's all about him as a person. Same with the Holocaust, such a clumsy reference to the point it comes off as intentionally in poor taste in order to elicit a reaction from the readers. There's also references to 9/11, again handled like ass, and Trump, plus other pop culture references that make the book feel dated and it's barely been 5 years since it was published. And it was so long, my god why was it so long.

Content Warnings