Scan barcode
A review by harmonj3
Curated by Nellie Wilson
3.0
In concept I love that this is a book about academics in a university museum. In practice it fell short for me in a lot of ways. Emmy was really frustrating at the beginning to the point of it feeling like she was far too mean to be real, or too mean to be someone you could empathize with. The character is written to kind of be insufferable until she just all of a sudden isn’t. I almost put the book down in the first 100 pages due to how mean she was for no real reason.
I am once again begging Nellie to move past white guilt as a plot device, particularly when I think all the main characters are white, because I think she has the capacity to write something really fun to read. A lot of Emmy’s critiques of Ryan fall short since shes also a white academic benefiting from a lot of privilege and as of 2023 there is enough out there about white feminism to do better. This book does mention COVID quite a bit and I expected there to be some sort of meaningful tie in, maybe some disability politics or other relevant plot point. It just comes up a bit without amounting to much. This whole plot point just felt under-researched. I would have really appreciated the COVID plot if it was important to the book, but it just seemed to be thrown in to place this book in a particular point in time without any real point.
I am once again begging Nellie to move past white guilt as a plot device, particularly when I think all the main characters are white, because I think she has the capacity to write something really fun to read. A lot of Emmy’s critiques of Ryan fall short since shes also a white academic benefiting from a lot of privilege and as of 2023 there is enough out there about white feminism to do better. This book does mention COVID quite a bit and I expected there to be some sort of meaningful tie in, maybe some disability politics or other relevant plot point. It just comes up a bit without amounting to much. This whole plot point just felt under-researched. I would have really appreciated the COVID plot if it was important to the book, but it just seemed to be thrown in to place this book in a particular point in time without any real point.
Content Warnings
Minor: Pandemic/Epidemic