axwosa77 's review for:

Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić

1.75

tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I came to this book with some expectations, it is one of the only books I've read written by ex-yugoslavia authors, and I was excited to see a different perspective in fiction, as I have seen from african or asian authors. However, very much like Sara in the book, I found that I rose a pedestal for the most common contemporary writer with nothing to say.

While the book has some not-as-bad moments,

like towards the end when Saralooks at Lejla, then at her hands and grasps the realisation that she lives for nothing but to become Lejla

, most of the book is nonsense talk by an unreliable, personalityless, obnoxiously melancholic character who has not enough identity to even have any opinion of her own, and even then, there is not even an interesting analysis on the concept of identity. It is, at best, an attempt to explore the return to a place that once was your home to people once meant everything to you, but not even that because other than that she only has a boyfriend she doesn't seem to care too much about and who she is only dating because he happens to own a copy of a quintessential British novel that does not even get discussed at all, and an avocado tree she does not even like. At worst it is just a fantasy of romanitasion of povery, misery and depression.

Again, at times it is not terrible,  another good example is when,

in the field after Lejla decides she needs to pee, there is a conversation addressing Sara's idealisation of Lejla regarding her phone, her job as a waiter and her life "decisions"

, however none of these seem to produce any reaction or growth in Sara's character as she continues to remember her childhood however best suits her and her self defeatist delusion. And, while Sara is merely a shell, Lejla is nothing, despite being the main subject of the novel, you learn nothing real about her, the whole book is about how Sara desires to become her and has a deeply unhealthy obsession with her but she is seen as a non-player in her own life, she is just an object to advance, even create, the plot and in the end she was inconsequential, Sara might as well be driving a package.

And the ending ruined it further, an ending that at times feels, as many have said before, as an Alice in Wonderland kind of situation but that seems like a pointless reference to Lewis Caroll's work without any sort of resolution or conclusion, the reader ends up with the feeling that it was a pointless trip that to empty shells of humans took for no reason with no significance. Lejla just threw a couple of questions and apologies about things that haooened 15 years prior and them ran away again, Sara only got disappointed and confused about a watercolor painting and evolved nothing in the whole book and Michael might as well be single because he has not heard from Sara in over a week an nobody even seems to care, further pointing at the meaningless life Sara pretends to lead in Dublin, who also does not even seem to have a job.

In the end this book felt like a waste of reading time and and a terrible incursion into eastern europe literature, the one good thing out of it is the name of other writers from the country, but I could have found those on Wikipedia.