magzanilla 's review for:

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

3.5

adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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It deleted our long review just as we finished it because of writing it on glitchy mobile... 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Torture, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Grief, Cannibalism, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Gaslighting, War, Injury/Injury detail, Classism

Moderate: Ableism, Homophobia, Misogyny, Sexual content, Abandonment

Minor: Incest

There is a lot of descriptions of cruelty, especially from the corrupt royal family that have powers. They do things like torture and kill people (including children) as their normal baseline. Abuse and mind control/brain washing and war and locking family members up and dying are a Thing. For example, The second terror has the power to will others to do as he commands. So he attempts to get someone to commit violent incest, but this doesn't actually happen. He does, however, get to command all kinds of other messed up things for his amusement. A lot of ableist slurs because one of the major characters is an amputee in a society that heavily stigmatizes amputation as a form of punishment. And another character was heavily shunned, neglected, and mentally regressed / animalistic, so he is often compared to a child/childe. Tbh, should just assume that all the content warnings appear in some form or another.