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renlau13 's review for:
Everything the Darkness Eats
by Eric LaRocca
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
As a fan of LaRocca's short stories, I was disappointed by this book.
Every paragraph was stuffed full of flowery, unnecessary similes that often didn't even make sense in the context of the sentence. From a sentence about someone leaving a room - "abandoning him the way napalm-scented civilians would single-file march from their burning homelands, forming a glorious diaspora". What? It's one person walking out of a room. At times it seemed like the author spent time writing a list of overly exaggerated similes and then wrote the book around them.
The characters were two dimensional and not particularly likeable. One of the main characters, 'Ghost', reads like a middle schooler's first OC, complete with cliché tragic backstory. The other main character's story was completely pointless -he is homophobically abused, beaten and gang raped, only for all of his memories of this to be magically erased. Well, what was the point of me reading about it?
The ableism surrounding a blind little girl character was written with such malicious cruelty that I assumed it was purposeful, that it would come back around later to show that characters had learned and grown and changed their beliefs. But, no, it wasn't addressed again.
Also, I don't think the author knows what the word 'coveted' means. It's used incorrectly about four times throughout the book. I think he just thinks it means to look at something?
Every paragraph was stuffed full of flowery, unnecessary similes that often didn't even make sense in the context of the sentence. From a sentence about someone leaving a room - "abandoning him the way napalm-scented civilians would single-file march from their burning homelands, forming a glorious diaspora". What? It's one person walking out of a room. At times it seemed like the author spent time writing a list of overly exaggerated similes and then wrote the book around them.
The characters were two dimensional and not particularly likeable. One of the main characters, 'Ghost', reads like a middle schooler's first OC, complete with cliché tragic backstory. The other main character's story was completely pointless -
The ableism surrounding a blind little girl character was written with such malicious cruelty that I assumed it was purposeful, that it would come back around later to show that characters had learned and grown and changed their beliefs. But, no, it wasn't addressed again.
Also, I don't think the author knows what the word 'coveted' means. It's used incorrectly about four times throughout the book. I think he just thinks it means to look at something?