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jessicaesquire 's review for:
Forty Acres
by Dwayne Alexander Smith
A thriller of the type you normally see atop bestseller lists and in airport bookstores, the kind you can speed through on a plane flight. And it's got a better concept than most thrillers, it makes you wonder if someone has sent it over to Jordan Peele to option.
I don't really love the standard thriller style, though, and the high concept wasn't enough for me to stay happily engaged. I waited for some good twists but didn't get them. And I found that this thriller suffers from one of the same major problems many thrillers by men suffer from (and why I've mostly stopped reading them): it has a real male gaze problem. Every single woman in this book is beautiful and her beauty must be commented on. Often the specifics of her breasts and her body are discussed in detail, as are her sexual appetites. They exist solely as the typical female archetypes. Although the men don't get to be much more on the page either, and while the book wants to take down a certain kind of masculinity, it's still awfully caught up in that masculinity itself. It's tempting to take it down to two stars, honestly.
I don't really love the standard thriller style, though, and the high concept wasn't enough for me to stay happily engaged. I waited for some good twists but didn't get them. And I found that this thriller suffers from one of the same major problems many thrillers by men suffer from (and why I've mostly stopped reading them): it has a real male gaze problem. Every single woman in this book is beautiful and her beauty must be commented on. Often the specifics of her breasts and her body are discussed in detail, as are her sexual appetites. They exist solely as the typical female archetypes. Although the men don't get to be much more on the page either, and while the book wants to take down a certain kind of masculinity, it's still awfully caught up in that masculinity itself. It's tempting to take it down to two stars, honestly.