Review by meemawreads - The Premonition

meemawreads 's review for:

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto

0.5

adventurous challenging medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This book is as old as me and I know it's not fair to hold old art to modern standards but EUGH. Total spoilers await, if you don't want them all you need to know is I'm glad I can't remember which online book creator recommended this because I'd have no choice but to lose respect for them.
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Onward to spoiltown!
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Ok. Female main character can't remember her childhood and it turns out it's because she was adopted after surviving the car crash that killed her parents. Her older sister has been posing as her aunt. Now at 19 she's remembered and goes on a nonsensical adventure after her aunt/sister with her adoptive brother, who she has no qualms IMMEDIATELY having romantic feelings for despite having grown up as siblings 🤮 We meet aunt/sister's jilted lover, a high school kid who she slept with when he was her student because she "liked his face." She aborted his baby without telling him and dumped him. Everyone just accepts this and encourages a reconciliation??? By the end we leave the sisters reunited and FMC thinking about how breaking it to their family that she wants to sleep with her adoptive brother is going to be difficult, but doable.

AM I ON DRUGS? This book doesn't just NOT hold up, it's badly written (or maybe badly translated), the narrator reads like a mannequin, no character has any personality and none of their motivations make sense. The half point it gets is for being nonchalant about abortion in the eighties, I'm going to assume that was ahead of its time. Full ew, half a tater 🍠/🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔

Content Warnings