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A review by reader_in_the_meadow
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
The 2015 novel 'A Little Life' written by Hanya Yanagihara tells the story of four college friends, Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB, and how their friendships and relationships evolve over the course of their lives. The book consists of seven parts, with all of them being parted into three chaoters, except the seveth part which only has one chapter. That brings us to a total of 19 chapters within seven parts.
The plot revolves mainly around Jude, the main character of the story, who is such a broken person, having experienced so many horrors in his childhood and teen years. Since their isn't more special going on, I'd say that this book is mainly character-driven.
As the reader we get continually told of the characters live, often switching the point of view and or the time setting via retrospects. By also occassionally changing from third to first person, we get even better insight of the feelings of the characters.
The cast of characters is very diverse. There is LGBTQ+ rep, disabled rep and BIPOC rep. As I am not disabled nor a person of color myself, I will only say, that the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals was very well executed and there were many sides of that coin shown.
I have to say that the characters were also very different from one another and every one was developed very precise and I had fun reading about them and their lives, because they were really interesting designed.
The writing was lovely and simple to read in my opinion. Although very wordsy there weren't any words I didn't know. I loved that the author used much time to describe anything into details which made it very easy to build up the atmosphere.
I liked that the autor made it as clear as possible about what you as reader should feel and conveyed that perfectly.
A thing I didn't like that much was that at some points the book was very sluggish and I really had to push myself to get through those parts.
In conclusion, I can definitely say that I enjoyed this book very much and it even made me shed some tears. which doesn't happen that often while reading. But I really advice anyone wnating to read this book to chek the content warnings because there are definitely a lot! But I can still recommend it to anyone who has the emotional capability to read it.
The plot revolves mainly around Jude, the main character of the story, who is such a broken person, having experienced so many horrors in his childhood and teen years. Since their isn't more special going on, I'd say that this book is mainly character-driven.
As the reader we get continually told of the characters live, often switching the point of view and or the time setting via retrospects. By also occassionally changing from third to first person, we get even better insight of the feelings of the characters.
The cast of characters is very diverse. There is LGBTQ+ rep, disabled rep and BIPOC rep. As I am not disabled nor a person of color myself, I will only say, that the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals was very well executed and there were many sides of that coin shown.
I have to say that the characters were also very different from one another and every one was developed very precise and I had fun reading about them and their lives, because they were really interesting designed.
The writing was lovely and simple to read in my opinion. Although very wordsy there weren't any words I didn't know. I loved that the author used much time to describe anything into details which made it very easy to build up the atmosphere.
I liked that the autor made it as clear as possible about what you as reader should feel and conveyed that perfectly.
A thing I didn't like that much was that at some points the book was very sluggish and I really had to push myself to get through those parts.
In conclusion, I can definitely say that I enjoyed this book very much and it even made me shed some tears. which doesn't happen that often while reading. But I really advice anyone wnating to read this book to chek the content warnings because there are definitely a lot! But I can still recommend it to anyone who has the emotional capability to read it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Ableism, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Car accident, Child abuse, Child death, Chronic illness, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Self harm, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Suicide attempt
Moderate: Alcohol, Biphobia, Body shaming, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Homophobia, Medical content, Mental illness, Toxic relationship, Toxic friendship, Transphobia, Violence, and Vomit