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A review by kkenna7
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
2.75
*Thank you to Zando and NetGalley for the ALC! All opinions are my own.*
I think I was tricking myself into thinking I liked this book for the first two-thirds of it because I was so excited for it. This book is well-written. The writing is gorgeous. HOWEVER, the numbers don't lie and it just doesn't ever take me this long to read books if I enjoy them. :/ First of all, as a disclaimer, I've never read the original Carmilla so I won't be speaking at all to the retelling aspect of this book. Okay, here goes.
Thing I liked:
The writing. As I said, the prose in this is wonderful. There's strings of text in here that are absolutely the reason I was feeling so duped into thinking I was having a good time with this one.
The narrator. She was wonderful the whole way through. Her voice was so perfectly match to the tone of the book and I loved her. I'm so glad I switched from the ebook to the audio!
The last third of the book. As soon asCarmilla finally gets through to Lenore about Henry's sabotage/they get together the pace picks up immensely. It is one of my biggest to critiques that I wish a bigger portion of the book had a pace similar to this. Which brings me to...
Things I didn't like so much:
Length/pacing. It's my biggest critique of most books I read/the thing I pay the most attention to. You see it mentioned in most of my reviews. I find pacing is what catches my attention more than any plot or character development. Which is why the first two-thirds of this book largely being without any real tension between Carmilla and Lenore left me unwilling to pick this one up to finish it.
The "sapphic" subplot. Here's where I'm most upset. I've read a handful of these "sapphic vampire" novels. All of them have many rave reviews about how queer they are, etc. and it's got me wondering if I'm the problem (and if I am, so be it), because the sapphic plots/subplots in these books are NOT ENOUGH. You cannot throw a scene or two of two girls fuckin' in the middle of a book, maybe one happens to a vampire which is neat, and call it a day. There is no real yearning. There is no tension or buildup to the moment. It's gratuitous and lazy.
In Hungerstone, we get over halfway through the book with nary a TOUCH OF THE HAND, A STOLEN GLANCE before they fuck each other out of nowhere one day. This isn't what sapphic literature should be, and we as a community should not be willing to take these CRUMBS quite frankly. We deserve more and these publishers/authors using these buzzwords to make money off of an already-underrepresented community has to stop.
I think I was tricking myself into thinking I liked this book for the first two-thirds of it because I was so excited for it. This book is well-written. The writing is gorgeous. HOWEVER, the numbers don't lie and it just doesn't ever take me this long to read books if I enjoy them. :/ First of all, as a disclaimer, I've never read the original Carmilla so I won't be speaking at all to the retelling aspect of this book. Okay, here goes.
Thing I liked:
The writing. As I said, the prose in this is wonderful. There's strings of text in here that are absolutely the reason I was feeling so duped into thinking I was having a good time with this one.
The narrator. She was wonderful the whole way through. Her voice was so perfectly match to the tone of the book and I loved her. I'm so glad I switched from the ebook to the audio!
The last third of the book. As soon as
Things I didn't like so much:
Length/pacing. It's my biggest critique of most books I read/the thing I pay the most attention to. You see it mentioned in most of my reviews. I find pacing is what catches my attention more than any plot or character development. Which is why the first two-thirds of this book largely being without any real tension between Carmilla and Lenore left me unwilling to pick this one up to finish it.
The "sapphic" subplot. Here's where I'm most upset. I've read a handful of these "sapphic vampire" novels. All of them have many rave reviews about how queer they are, etc. and it's got me wondering if I'm the problem (and if I am, so be it), because the sapphic plots/subplots in these books are NOT ENOUGH. You cannot throw a scene or two of two girls fuckin' in the middle of a book, maybe one happens to a vampire which is neat, and call it a day. There is no real yearning. There is no tension or buildup to the moment. It's gratuitous and lazy.
In Hungerstone, we get over halfway through the book with nary a TOUCH OF THE HAND, A STOLEN GLANCE before they fuck each other out of nowhere one day. This isn't what sapphic literature should be, and we as a community should not be willing to take these CRUMBS quite frankly. We deserve more and these publishers/authors using these buzzwords to make money off of an already-underrepresented community has to stop.