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azuki 's review for:
Imagine Wanting Only This
by Kristen Radtke
I'm not sure where to begin. I think a fellow Goodreads user captures a lot of my feelings in the first line of their review: "A depressed young white woman moves from location to location and picks up local culture--sometimes literally stealing it, sometimes wandering through as an ill-equipped, uninformed tourist." I also felt like I was reading "a self-absorbed, joyless tomb raid" (literally. The author's theft of items from Seth Thomas' memorial, plus her repeated invocation of his memory based on nothing except a newspaper article and a lot of projection, is unsettling and disrespectful). The only things I'll add are that images read a lot like clip art, and the way the author describes the history of devastated places fails to give any proper acknowledgment of how colonialism, gentrification, and other dynamics of social injustice contribute to the ruins she... explores? hijacks? renders without so much of a passing nod to the genocide that some of these places hold the violence of? If you're looking for illustrated treatments of grief, loss, and depression, there are others out there with far more self-reflection, and less of the imperialism of white woman tourism.