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A review by soupgirlreads
The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee
4.0
Goodreads deleted my review so here we go again
Rating: A strong 3.5 rounded up to 4
"The thing about being bi is that it seems like there's an option for you to just be normal. Like you have an easy way out...But that escape is a slow death in itself, a self-inflicted drowning"
The biggest strength of the book comes in the form of its commentary regarding mental health, poverty, queerness, generational trauma, and religious trauma. The depiction of the sheer bleakness that comes with poverty was just so well done, and despite Slater being a fictional location, I found the Angel persona to be such an insightful parallel to the suicide epidemic in impoverished, rural, isolated environments such as Native reservations in the U.S.
I also felt that the themes of religious trauma, shame, and sin, as well as generational trauma and genetically/environmentally passed-on mental illness, while all given a supernatural spin, were very well depicted. I also appreciated just how queer this book was, with almost every character being somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum :)
I will say that some of the supernatural elements were lost on me, and at times it became really hard to locate where the character was situated (Is she hallucinating being in a cave-like area? Is she at home? Where is the dreaded quarry? Who is at the graveyard at the climax of the book?). But other than that, I was really able to empathize with the deeply-mentally-ill-but-trying-to-heal MC, and I enjoyed reading this debut!
Rating: A strong 3.5 rounded up to 4
"The thing about being bi is that it seems like there's an option for you to just be normal. Like you have an easy way out...But that escape is a slow death in itself, a self-inflicted drowning"
The biggest strength of the book comes in the form of its commentary regarding mental health, poverty, queerness, generational trauma, and religious trauma. The depiction of the sheer bleakness that comes with poverty was just so well done, and despite Slater being a fictional location, I found the Angel persona to be such an insightful parallel to the suicide epidemic in impoverished, rural, isolated environments such as Native reservations in the U.S.
I also felt that the themes of religious trauma, shame, and sin, as well as generational trauma and genetically/environmentally passed-on mental illness, while all given a supernatural spin, were very well depicted. I also appreciated just how queer this book was, with almost every character being somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum :)
I will say that some of the supernatural elements were lost on me, and at times it became really hard to locate where the character was situated (Is she hallucinating being in a cave-like area? Is she at home? Where is the dreaded quarry? Who is at the graveyard at the climax of the book?). But other than that, I was really able to empathize with the deeply-mentally-ill-but-trying-to-heal MC, and I enjoyed reading this debut!