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rayereads 's review for:
With Regrets
by Lee Kelly
This is the third cozy catastrophe I’ve read this year that was clearly written in the time since and as a response to the COVID-19 lockdown, and I have yet to read one that has transcended its origin. (The Parliament and Your Shadow Half Remains were the other two, for those keeping score.)
This was just… very middle of the road. The characters were incredibly unlikable for the first 3/4 of the book, and in a couple of cases cartoonishly so. I think I understand the motivation for that: it gives you somewhere to go with the characters by the end. But unfortunately, the characters were so thinly sketched that the payoff of their character arcs just didn’t feel very satisfying or earned.
With such stereotypical characters, it leaves it to the plot to do a lot of the heavy lifting of storytelling, but I’m not necessarily sure there’s much there either aside from some soap opera style dramatic tropes, and a little bit of apocalyptic flavor.
Lee clearly has writing chops and there were parts of the prose, particularly the descriptive passages, that were quite nice. There was also a good amount of set up and pay off, with things that were mentioned early on coming back to play late in the book in a way that felt satisfying as a reader.
There was exactly enough here to keep me turning pages, but not enough to make this must recommend. Starting to think I’ve ruined apocalyptic literature for myself, by becoming a bit of a connoisseur.
This was just… very middle of the road. The characters were incredibly unlikable for the first 3/4 of the book, and in a couple of cases cartoonishly so. I think I understand the motivation for that: it gives you somewhere to go with the characters by the end. But unfortunately, the characters were so thinly sketched that the payoff of their character arcs just didn’t feel very satisfying or earned.
With such stereotypical characters, it leaves it to the plot to do a lot of the heavy lifting of storytelling, but I’m not necessarily sure there’s much there either aside from some soap opera style dramatic tropes, and a little bit of apocalyptic flavor.
Lee clearly has writing chops and there were parts of the prose, particularly the descriptive passages, that were quite nice. There was also a good amount of set up and pay off, with things that were mentioned early on coming back to play late in the book in a way that felt satisfying as a reader.
There was exactly enough here to keep me turning pages, but not enough to make this must recommend. Starting to think I’ve ruined apocalyptic literature for myself, by becoming a bit of a connoisseur.