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missed_bandwagon 's review for:
Equal Affections
by David Leavitt
The summary really pulled a wooly over my eyes, not gonna lie. I thought we were going to spend the majority of the book looking through the lens of the mother or at least have chapters going through different people’s points of view. I think the book spent way too much time on the backgrounds and personal lives of everyone else and didn’t really focus on the last moments of spending time with the mother. Did they even like their mother? Anything that they did for her felt more like fake obligation. Doing things out of obligation can already feel cold and robotic. So to even fake obligation sounds worse and comes across as “I’d rather be anywhere else than here.” I didn’t like either of the children, especially April, the father was a bastard and deserved nothing good, and the son’s boyfriend was super creepy with how close he was to the family. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been in a relationship like that, but it felt like he wanted to date their son but wanted to be adopted into the family at the same time.
That was another strange feature as well. The narrative went from the mother to the children to the boyfriend? The boyfriend and his weird cheating-but-not-cheating online dalliance? It felt like the author had a LOT to say, but throughout the writing process realized, “Oh shoot I’m supposed to be talking about the dying mother! How do I loop this back into the main narrative?”
The characters are more or less estranged from one another but they have an unhealthy attachment to each other as well. Each person knows how they feel and they know how they feel about one another. But they insist on keeping most things bottled up, gritting their teeth, and clenching their fists, hoping that the other person will pick up on their discomfort and agony. I don’t want to go much into each of the characters, they were very unlikeable. But the overall…collection of thoughts, feelings, themes, perspectives…it just felt like a peek into the lives of people who are, needless to say, unremarkable. Definitely would not recommend.
That was another strange feature as well. The narrative went from the mother to the children to the boyfriend? The boyfriend and his weird cheating-but-not-cheating online dalliance? It felt like the author had a LOT to say, but throughout the writing process realized, “Oh shoot I’m supposed to be talking about the dying mother! How do I loop this back into the main narrative?”
The characters are more or less estranged from one another but they have an unhealthy attachment to each other as well. Each person knows how they feel and they know how they feel about one another. But they insist on keeping most things bottled up, gritting their teeth, and clenching their fists, hoping that the other person will pick up on their discomfort and agony. I don’t want to go much into each of the characters, they were very unlikeable. But the overall…collection of thoughts, feelings, themes, perspectives…it just felt like a peek into the lives of people who are, needless to say, unremarkable. Definitely would not recommend.