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celestialcachet 's review for:
How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy
by Claire Mitchell, Zoe Venditozzi
challenging
dark
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
So I’m going to give this a 2.5 for a couple reasons:
1) first off, the book could have benefitted greatly from having an editor/a stronger editor. There were multiple times where I found myself reading a section and thought “hey didn’t I just read this? Did I accidentally repeat a line/section?” only to go back and read that no, I had not but the book was repeating a point it had just made a couple lines/paragraph ago.
2) God lord! The number of footnotes. This was distracting as hell for me. Again, wish an editor/stronger editor had taken a pass at this before publication. It got to the point where the excessive footnotes became a distraction to me and started skipping them. Too many too frequently and you break up the attention and pace of the point you’re trying to make in the main text. Some other readers cited the footnotes as fun and amusing but I can’t say that I agree with them.
3) generally not a fan of AI inclusion of any sort (won’t get into it in this review) so I was very disappointed to find an AI image and “artist” cited near the end of the book. With as much research that was put into the rest of this book, one would hope that the authors would take a bit of time to research how destructive and unethical AI “art” is and never should be included in any work that aims to be taken seriously. AI art isn’t a genuine art form built on craft, skill, talent, or hard work. Instead it steals and creates shortcuts for those uninterested in putting in the work. Disappointing to see that slop included in here.
All that aside, I LOVED the idea behind the work of this book and the authors. The amount of research is commendable and well explored. There was a part laid out early on in the book that is sad but brilliantly evergreen in that “that when the going gets tough in any society, it is the vulnerable that are accused of causing the damage, as an easy target to avoid dealing with the greater problems of inequality.”
A lot (LOT) of good work in this book I just wish it were a bit more polished before publication.
1) first off, the book could have benefitted greatly from having an editor/a stronger editor. There were multiple times where I found myself reading a section and thought “hey didn’t I just read this? Did I accidentally repeat a line/section?” only to go back and read that no, I had not but the book was repeating a point it had just made a couple lines/paragraph ago.
2) God lord! The number of footnotes. This was distracting as hell for me. Again, wish an editor/stronger editor had taken a pass at this before publication. It got to the point where the excessive footnotes became a distraction to me and started skipping them. Too many too frequently and you break up the attention and pace of the point you’re trying to make in the main text. Some other readers cited the footnotes as fun and amusing but I can’t say that I agree with them.
3) generally not a fan of AI inclusion of any sort (won’t get into it in this review) so I was very disappointed to find an AI image and “artist” cited near the end of the book. With as much research that was put into the rest of this book, one would hope that the authors would take a bit of time to research how destructive and unethical AI “art” is and never should be included in any work that aims to be taken seriously. AI art isn’t a genuine art form built on craft, skill, talent, or hard work. Instead it steals and creates shortcuts for those uninterested in putting in the work. Disappointing to see that slop included in here.
All that aside, I LOVED the idea behind the work of this book and the authors. The amount of research is commendable and well explored. There was a part laid out early on in the book that is sad but brilliantly evergreen in that “that when the going gets tough in any society, it is the vulnerable that are accused of causing the damage, as an easy target to avoid dealing with the greater problems of inequality.”
A lot (LOT) of good work in this book I just wish it were a bit more polished before publication.