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A review by katie_is_dreaming
The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan
1.0
1.5
Sometimes a book sounds so intriguing, so you buy a copy, and then you start to read it, and you find it's really not for you at all. Sadly, this is what happened here.
This book is a group of elements that don't go together for me. We have Dylan, who goes to Scotland after his mother and grandmother's deaths in an attempt to grieve and get on with his life. There, he meets Constance and her daughter Stella, and promptly develops an attraction to Constance, who's somewhat of a social pariah in town because of her so-called promiscuity.
We also have Stella, a trans teen, dealing with the difficulties of transition in a small town full of narrow-minded people.
And encompassing those stories, we have the arrival of the coldest winter on record, and all the anxiety about climate change that goes along with it.
I liked the trans rep, but I didn't see how that went with Dylan's story or the climate change story. Fagan seemed to be talking about lives in progress as this catastrophic winter descends, but it didn't feel particularly nuanced or special to me.
And I hated the Dylan/Constance storyline, like, really hated it. I think it particularly irked me because this was a female writer, and I felt nauseated by the way she wrote Dylan thinking about Constance. Constant erections and the phrase 'secretary porn star' (or it could have been porn star secretary). Yuck! There was also a really weird reveal in the second section of the book that made me roll my eyes and think 'Really? We're doing this now?' It felt like Fagan wanted this to be some kind of fated or cosmic connection and I was really not on board, at all.
The writing was ok. The events felt kind of mundane, though, which is surprising given what the characters were living through. I suspect that was deliberate, but it felt like an odd choice. I think I just wanted more on the climate stuff, and I think the mundanity of the events is probably why none of this felt special to me. I think it was supposed to be a tale of survival against the odds (which is rather uncertain anyway), but it didn't feel like it was written that way.
I don't know. This was a strange, and rather unpleasant, reading experience for me. No one's going to get along with every book, of course, but I feel like the actual story didn't do the blurb justice, which is not what you want to have happen.
Sometimes a book sounds so intriguing, so you buy a copy, and then you start to read it, and you find it's really not for you at all. Sadly, this is what happened here.
This book is a group of elements that don't go together for me. We have Dylan, who goes to Scotland after his mother and grandmother's deaths in an attempt to grieve and get on with his life. There, he meets Constance and her daughter Stella, and promptly develops an attraction to Constance, who's somewhat of a social pariah in town because of her so-called promiscuity.
We also have Stella, a trans teen, dealing with the difficulties of transition in a small town full of narrow-minded people.
And encompassing those stories, we have the arrival of the coldest winter on record, and all the anxiety about climate change that goes along with it.
I liked the trans rep, but I didn't see how that went with Dylan's story or the climate change story. Fagan seemed to be talking about lives in progress as this catastrophic winter descends, but it didn't feel particularly nuanced or special to me.
And I hated the Dylan/Constance storyline, like, really hated it. I think it particularly irked me because this was a female writer, and I felt nauseated by the way she wrote Dylan thinking about Constance. Constant erections and the phrase 'secretary porn star' (or it could have been porn star secretary). Yuck! There was also a really weird reveal in the second section of the book that made me roll my eyes and think 'Really? We're doing this now?' It felt like Fagan wanted this to be some kind of fated or cosmic connection and I was really not on board, at all.
The writing was ok. The events felt kind of mundane, though, which is surprising given what the characters were living through. I suspect that was deliberate, but it felt like an odd choice. I think I just wanted more on the climate stuff, and I think the mundanity of the events is probably why none of this felt special to me. I think it was supposed to be a tale of survival against the odds (which is rather uncertain anyway), but it didn't feel like it was written that way.
I don't know. This was a strange, and rather unpleasant, reading experience for me. No one's going to get along with every book, of course, but I feel like the actual story didn't do the blurb justice, which is not what you want to have happen.