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jaclyncrupi 's review for:
Feast
by Emily O'Grady
I sometimes read a novel and think of all the characters you could conjure, you chose to bring these ones to life on the page. Equally, of all the stories you could tell, this was the one you chose to agonise over for years. Good prose always pushes these thoughts away. A novel of characters with dark secrets that get slowly revealed is not uncommon. Here the secrets are particularly awful, as are the characters and the ways they behave. I found it all pretty bleak and depressing and ultimately I wondered what the point of it all was. Humans are vile. This was not a question of likability, I prefer unlikable characters. It was more a matter of me thinking about the reasons you would ask a reader to spend this much time with these people. I wish I saw in the prose what the Stella prize judges did as that would certainly have elevated my reading experience. So I put this down to an incompatibility between a writer and a reader.