A review by lyc4nthropes
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

2.5

this book is infuriating, and not entirely for the reasons it's intended to be. this book would've greatly benefited from leaving out the final chapter. maybe this is my bad on assuming, but i assumed this book was supposed to be written in a way that sort of mimicked revisionist history-type writing. with that in mind, it would make zero sense for norton to have even written the chapter detailing his rape of his son. he believes himself to be this great figure in science that will go down in history for the work he's done, and he's just going to write in graphic detail an act that he knows no one but his colleague could forgive? sorry, but it made no sense, and it was so needless and heavy-handed. we know he did it. it's clear he's a bad enough person to commit such a vile act. it didn't need to be described to us. i think hanya yanagihara herself could benefit a lot from listening to the people telling her she's weird for how often she writes, in great detail, about grown men raping young boys.

this book could've been really smart. its full focus needed to be on the destruction of an entire set of islands of peoples caused by the selfishness and the evil of one man made to represent a much bigger and centuries deep systematic issue. i thought that was the entire point. i thought that the sexual violence committed against his son, landing him in prison was going to be an afterthought, given that the book is written through the eyes of the man that commited the crime and edited by a man that is so thoroughly stuck up norton's ass that the outright states that he doesn't care if norton raped his son because everyone should just be focusing on how smart he is instead. it's clear by now that i think this, but it ruined the entire book.