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jugglingpup 's review for:
The City Beautiful
by Aden Polydoros
To see more reviews check out MI Book Reviews.
I got an ARC of this book.
I have been done with this book for about a week, but I am still not sure what to say.
The writing was gorgeous. The plot was fantastic. The characters were real. It was so Jewish. I have never read a book like this before.
The book is in your face and undeniably Jewish. It has a different feel than any other horror novel I have read. It doesn’t follow the typical formula. The closest books I can match this to are books like The Only Good Indians. Both are books steeped in lore that is older and less explored in the mainstream. Both are seemingly normal, but the more thought that goes into them the more horrific them become. There are just so many layers.
The queer content was eh. I didn’t need this to be a queer book to love it. The queer aspects didn’t really blend seamlessly to me. While I was glad there were queer characters, it only ever seemed to come up as the plot of “gay is a sin!” and then things moved on again. It just didn’t get explored as much as the other plots did so it felt like it was lacking compared to the rest of the book. That being said, it is so rare that I see Jewish queers that I ate up every second and wanted more. I needed more.
I am not normally someone who enjoys the mystery aspects of anything. I didn’t really care who was doing the killing. I was still invested in the characters and their feelings around the killings. The actual finding of the killer was irrelevant to me. I was a bit annoyed at just how perfectly things lined up with time and locations. That a teen was able to track down someone across multiple countries and everything. Felt like a bit much.
Overall, I loved this book. Every time I picked it up, I had to be forced to put it down. I didn’t want to stop. It was just a book I needed.
I got an ARC of this book.
I have been done with this book for about a week, but I am still not sure what to say.
The writing was gorgeous. The plot was fantastic. The characters were real. It was so Jewish. I have never read a book like this before.
The book is in your face and undeniably Jewish. It has a different feel than any other horror novel I have read. It doesn’t follow the typical formula. The closest books I can match this to are books like The Only Good Indians. Both are books steeped in lore that is older and less explored in the mainstream. Both are seemingly normal, but the more thought that goes into them the more horrific them become. There are just so many layers.
The queer content was eh. I didn’t need this to be a queer book to love it. The queer aspects didn’t really blend seamlessly to me. While I was glad there were queer characters, it only ever seemed to come up as the plot of “gay is a sin!” and then things moved on again. It just didn’t get explored as much as the other plots did so it felt like it was lacking compared to the rest of the book. That being said, it is so rare that I see Jewish queers that I ate up every second and wanted more. I needed more.
I am not normally someone who enjoys the mystery aspects of anything. I didn’t really care who was doing the killing. I was still invested in the characters and their feelings around the killings. The actual finding of the killer was irrelevant to me. I was a bit annoyed at just how perfectly things lined up with time and locations. That a teen was able to track down someone across multiple countries and everything. Felt like a bit much.
Overall, I loved this book. Every time I picked it up, I had to be forced to put it down. I didn’t want to stop. It was just a book I needed.