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vlf218 's review for:
Gingerbread
by Helen Oyeyemi
This was all over the place. My main problem is that that the author is so caught up in trying to make her descriptions and turns of phrases whimsical, that what she’s actually trying to convey is getting lost. She also did a lot of telling the reader how characters felt instead of the characters just showing us naturally. I felt like we barely stayed in any scene lead by any kind of dialogue. We’d get a sentence or two then we had to suffer through more endless prose.
As for the actual story, it meandered for practically the entire book. It’s like the author had so many ideas that she was married to so she shoehorned it all in despite none of it fitting together. Pick a story and stick with it all the way through! There were so many partially formed characters that it was impossible to keep track. We’d just jump from location to location with no explanation. There were all these side stories that read as annoyingly long tangents. I couldn’t give a comprehensive summary if I tried. This was such a mess I honestly would have given up on this if I wasn’t reading it with friends.
As for the actual story, it meandered for practically the entire book. It’s like the author had so many ideas that she was married to so she shoehorned it all in despite none of it fitting together. Pick a story and stick with it all the way through! There were so many partially formed characters that it was impossible to keep track. We’d just jump from location to location with no explanation. There were all these side stories that read as annoyingly long tangents. I couldn’t give a comprehensive summary if I tried. This was such a mess I honestly would have given up on this if I wasn’t reading it with friends.