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A review by inuyasha
Kill For Love by Laura Picklesimer
3.0
can't recall another time i've been so sure i'd love a book only to be disappointed by it's execution. prefacing this with a quick one sentence blurb of: i found this incredibly fun but it completely falls off the tracks by the end - the main character has a really great voice but i questioned what kind of story the author was trying to tell many times.
this is blurbed as a "female american psycho" meets "promising young woman" (a movie i hated and picked up in spite of this) and ... yeah! you get exactly what it says on the tin. the problem is, this book feels too caught up in being referential that it struggles to form its own identity in the first third, and while the character voice is good, it's not something we haven't seen before, and it's definitely difficult to discern tiffany from the slew of protagonists in this cloying, love-to-hate, "sad girl" subgenre. when it does finally come to its own, it doesn't go anywhere fun or interesting, and you find yourself wishing it had gone down the predictable route.
the commentary in kill for love, and by association, it's likeness to promising young woman is bizarre and half-baked at best. in the beginning, tiffany's motivations and defenses for why she kills men are boilerplate language men use to justify committing acts of sexual violence - (s)he shouldn't have followed me out here alone, (s)he should have been more careful, etc. i did not enjoy this kind of tired song and dance about spinning rape culture around, but it at least had some consistency. eventually, the kills in this devolve into a) seemingly random encounters, to kill for kills sake b) a method of control (people who know things about her she'd rather not get out) and c) an act of revenge that seemed wildly out of left field for tiffany's characterization. the kills didn't need to all have meaning, but it was weird to start it off beating you over the head with "don't you get it? she's doing MURDER the way men do RAPE" in the beginning and then kind of drop that.
i also think, despite tiffany being a fun character voice, that this largely did not work because the story picklesimer is trying to convey cannot work with a protagonist like tiffany. a satire of college campus greek life, rape culture, etc cannot really feel like a satire when no one buys tiffany's shit in-text and also there is very little rebellion happening in tiffany's character in a story that wants you to believe some kind of rebellion is occurring. the reason patrick bates is a compelling character is because the way he behaves (methodical skin routine, for an example) goes against the grain of the archetypical male character, and specifically the archetypical male psychopath we knew before AP. tiffany, however, is exactly how many people WOULD imagine a SoCal sorority girl. there is no subversion, there is no bite. okay, we get it - rich people are cold and often times mentally fucked up and bad people - so what?
a bunch of half-hearted attempts to discuss white privilege, rape culture, and classism that largely lead nowhere - but i'll give it that this book was compulsively readable, and did very well at keeping tensions high, however, it all kind of fell apart like a bad car crash in the last act. like... i find it insanely hard to follow how the events of the novel, specifically tiffany's actions, would get us to that point.
this is blurbed as a "female american psycho" meets "promising young woman" (a movie i hated and picked up in spite of this) and ... yeah! you get exactly what it says on the tin. the problem is, this book feels too caught up in being referential that it struggles to form its own identity in the first third, and while the character voice is good, it's not something we haven't seen before, and it's definitely difficult to discern tiffany from the slew of protagonists in this cloying, love-to-hate, "sad girl" subgenre. when it does finally come to its own, it doesn't go anywhere fun or interesting, and you find yourself wishing it had gone down the predictable route.
the commentary in kill for love, and by association, it's likeness to promising young woman is bizarre and half-baked at best. in the beginning, tiffany's motivations and defenses for why she kills men are boilerplate language men use to justify committing acts of sexual violence - (s)he shouldn't have followed me out here alone, (s)he should have been more careful, etc. i did not enjoy this kind of tired song and dance about spinning rape culture around, but it at least had some consistency. eventually, the kills in this devolve into a) seemingly random encounters, to kill for kills sake b) a method of control (people who know things about her she'd rather not get out) and c) an act of revenge that seemed wildly out of left field for tiffany's characterization. the kills didn't need to all have meaning, but it was weird to start it off beating you over the head with "don't you get it? she's doing MURDER the way men do RAPE" in the beginning and then kind of drop that.
i also think, despite tiffany being a fun character voice, that this largely did not work because the story picklesimer is trying to convey cannot work with a protagonist like tiffany. a satire of college campus greek life, rape culture, etc cannot really feel like a satire when no one buys tiffany's shit in-text and also there is very little rebellion happening in tiffany's character in a story that wants you to believe some kind of rebellion is occurring. the reason patrick bates is a compelling character is because the way he behaves (methodical skin routine, for an example) goes against the grain of the archetypical male character, and specifically the archetypical male psychopath we knew before AP. tiffany, however, is exactly how many people WOULD imagine a SoCal sorority girl. there is no subversion, there is no bite. okay, we get it - rich people are cold and often times mentally fucked up and bad people - so what?
a bunch of half-hearted attempts to discuss white privilege, rape culture, and classism that largely lead nowhere - but i'll give it that this book was compulsively readable, and did very well at keeping tensions high, however, it all kind of fell apart like a bad car crash in the last act. like... i find it insanely hard to follow how the events of the novel, specifically tiffany's actions, would get us to that point.