A review by troglodata
A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz

2.0

So, this was weird. There's a lot of animosity, it seems, reading other folks' comments, and I get it. This is one odd book, and if one were to go into it with certain expectations, it would be a pretty frustrating read. The structure of the book is intriguing, but confusing. I wish the narrative jumps were demarcated more clearly because it took me an embarrassingly long time to sort out how it worked. But maybe that was intentional. In a way, it would make sense for that to be intentional, because of the chaos of war and unreliable narrators and histories and yadda yadda yadda. But this was a fascinatingly constructed world that we only got to see frustratingly brief glimpses of due to the scattered structure, and also because these kids were weirdly wrapped up in their own intimate, closed-off world which only periodically opened at the oddest times to allow others inside. Which leads me to acknowledge how very much I did not understand these characters or what they were being motivated by or what was dictating their moods for most of the novel. Don't get me wrong--I appreciate a good aloof character. But an aloofness like Beckan's didn't serve this story in the right way, maybe because I couldn't help but feel that she was so inconsistent in it. Add to that the heavy handed "Kids, this is our world, and it's up to us to make it better!" revolutionary rebellion and it just kind of makes me groan. Because seriously, the first step to your rebellion is to design a flag? Don't get me started on their little roundtable discussions inevitably dissolving into multi-part temper tantrums. Start-and-stop speech patterns are also something I normally appreciate in a good book. But here, it felt entirely too forced. And, yeah, characters who spend so much time in one another's company are going to pick up some of the others' speech patterns and quirks, but that doesn't mean their lines of conversation should be indistinguishable from each others'. To wrap up, because I am dangerously close to writing an essay, I am side-eyeing the hell out of this book because I can't help but feel a gnawing sense of frustration at some unrealized potential here.