Scan barcode
A review by ketreads
Pod by Laline Paull
dark
0.25
TRIGGER WARNING!
I would not have finished this book for anything less than the May Fantasy Fellowship Readathon. I complainted incessantly on the group chat just to drag myself through the whole thing.
The main character/s of this book are Dolphins and while it does have some PoVs outside of these two, it mostly revolves around these main two. Sad to say, these extra PoVs were often distracting and sometimes outright pointless. At some points the book SEEMED to have some form of connection to the reader (mostly in the form of Google the military trained dolphin) only to have this pulled out from under you by the many competing voices throughout. Ea is by far the most central character and yet we're given very little development leading up to the inciting incident, only for it to fall a part very soon after.
The writing style at first felt lyrical and an interesting way to use animal communication methods (having all dialogue take place through clicks, waves, or other italic font) but said dialogue is bland and often felt juvinile. The story felt confusingly pointless as well as adding in too many details that had little to no impact on the story itself or felt as though it had no real build up to feel satisfying.
My main gripe is that this book featured as LOT of rape. Like, A LOT.
If you remove the fact that these characters are dolphins, this book is 70% about rape. The anthropomorphism of the majority of characters ended up ruining the little this book had going for it (a unique PoV). We're subjected to this for the majority of the books run time and I genuienly struggled.
The worst part about this is the book was also boring. The inciting incident, character arcs, and multiple PoVs end up having very little impact on the story at all.
I would not have finished this book for anything less than the May Fantasy Fellowship Readathon. I complainted incessantly on the group chat just to drag myself through the whole thing.
The main character/s of this book are Dolphins and while it does have some PoVs outside of these two, it mostly revolves around these main two. Sad to say, these extra PoVs were often distracting and sometimes outright pointless. At some points the book SEEMED to have some form of connection to the reader (mostly in the form of Google the military trained dolphin) only to have this pulled out from under you by the many competing voices throughout. Ea is by far the most central character and yet we're given very little development leading up to the inciting incident, only for it to fall a part very soon after.
The writing style at first felt lyrical and an interesting way to use animal communication methods (having all dialogue take place through clicks, waves, or other italic font) but said dialogue is bland and often felt juvinile. The story felt confusingly pointless as well as adding in too many details that had little to no impact on the story itself or felt as though it had no real build up to feel satisfying.
My main gripe is that this book featured as LOT of rape. Like, A LOT.
If you remove the fact that these characters are dolphins, this book is 70% about rape. The anthropomorphism of the majority of characters ended up ruining the little this book had going for it (a unique PoV). We're subjected to this for the majority of the books run time and I genuienly struggled.
The worst part about this is the book was also boring. The inciting incident, character arcs, and multiple PoVs end up having very little impact on the story at all.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Drug use, Sexism, Misogyny, Rape, and Sexual assault