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A review by starfleeting
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
1.0
This was a book I had been looking forward to since I first saw it here on Goodreads. This was a book I was excited for even after seeing how short it was.
This book was not at ALL what I was wanting.
To say it is "verbose" is a generous thing. It's fucking overwritten and pretentious to the point that any decent to good sentences it has are choked out or buried by descriptors and similes that make no sense. This book should've taken me a day to read. A few hours. It took me a week because it was so overwritten it was almost unreadable.
I thought for a time that it was me. That I was too dumb to understand it or just wasn't used to a writing style like this so I had to give it some grace, right? The whole style had felt weird for me to get through because while some sentences flowed, others would just keep going on and on. And others I kept tripping over.
Until I finally realized: no, this writing is just Bad. That's why it feels weird. That's why it makes me feel like I'm missing something. Because the story itself is missing something very important: quality.
We're taught how books using description and big words make it "better". But this is a case of a writer trying too damn hard to make a book sound better than it is -- and it snuffs out the potential it had in the process.
The characters were insufferable and I didn't know why any of them were friends. The two women failed the Bechdel test in a book by a woman. And the bisexual narrator pines over 3 asshole men (and only men) when she clearly needs to just move the fuck on.
A lot of people said they had problems with all the Japanese terms and I think it's really just a testament to my being entrenched in Japanese culture and folklore for the better part of two decades that I had zero issue knowing what was being talked about or referred to. The words I had the problems with were dozens of words ripped from a goddamn thesaurus when the better punch to her writing would've been the simpler terms.
Man, this book needed a fucking red pen taken to it at least two more times before seeing print. What a fucking waste of a good premise.
This book was not at ALL what I was wanting.
To say it is "verbose" is a generous thing. It's fucking overwritten and pretentious to the point that any decent to good sentences it has are choked out or buried by descriptors and similes that make no sense. This book should've taken me a day to read. A few hours. It took me a week because it was so overwritten it was almost unreadable.
I thought for a time that it was me. That I was too dumb to understand it or just wasn't used to a writing style like this so I had to give it some grace, right? The whole style had felt weird for me to get through because while some sentences flowed, others would just keep going on and on. And others I kept tripping over.
Until I finally realized: no, this writing is just Bad. That's why it feels weird. That's why it makes me feel like I'm missing something. Because the story itself is missing something very important: quality.
We're taught how books using description and big words make it "better". But this is a case of a writer trying too damn hard to make a book sound better than it is -- and it snuffs out the potential it had in the process.
The characters were insufferable and I didn't know why any of them were friends. The two women failed the Bechdel test in a book by a woman. And the bisexual narrator pines over 3 asshole men (and only men) when she clearly needs to just move the fuck on.
A lot of people said they had problems with all the Japanese terms and I think it's really just a testament to my being entrenched in Japanese culture and folklore for the better part of two decades that I had zero issue knowing what was being talked about or referred to. The words I had the problems with were dozens of words ripped from a goddamn thesaurus when the better punch to her writing would've been the simpler terms.
Man, this book needed a fucking red pen taken to it at least two more times before seeing print. What a fucking waste of a good premise.