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pemma6 's review for:
The World Cannot Give
by Tara Isabella Burton
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Laura is quiet and cries easily and is obsessed with a book written by a man who died young. She goes to the boarding school he went to in hopes that her life will finally start. Instead, she meets Virginia Strauss. The publisher's description calls this a "shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world." And honestly, I think it works.
Maybe it works because I have always loved books where the characters do not really act like real people or talk like real people or think like real people. They focus too narrowly on ideas of transcendence and the meaning of life and do things that no one would actually do. But I love these narrow, focused narratives -- especially when they're at boarding schools. And while the characters are high schoolers, I think this reads more like the "dark academia" staples of "The Secret History" and "If We Were Villains" (the prose isn't as strong, but Tartt is hard to beat there). It's needlessly emotional and dramatic, but it's also cutting and cynical and doesn't mess around.
It's not an overly queer story or too shocking -- though the final climax is intense, it's just part of the formula you come to expect from these stories. But lots of it was familiar in the problems you have as a teenager that don't go away as an adult: what does it mean, how do we make a mark, why don't other people take the same things seriously, when will it feel like we've grown up, what happens when we follow the wrong people, what happens when we realize we're followers and not leaders?
So, it worked for me. While it was ridiculous at times (no one can run eight miles that easily, honestly) it was honest enough in others for me to be thinking about it after I finished.
4 stars.
Laura is quiet and cries easily and is obsessed with a book written by a man who died young. She goes to the boarding school he went to in hopes that her life will finally start. Instead, she meets Virginia Strauss. The publisher's description calls this a "shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world." And honestly, I think it works.
Maybe it works because I have always loved books where the characters do not really act like real people or talk like real people or think like real people. They focus too narrowly on ideas of transcendence and the meaning of life and do things that no one would actually do. But I love these narrow, focused narratives -- especially when they're at boarding schools. And while the characters are high schoolers, I think this reads more like the "dark academia" staples of "The Secret History" and "If We Were Villains" (the prose isn't as strong, but Tartt is hard to beat there). It's needlessly emotional and dramatic, but it's also cutting and cynical and doesn't mess around.
It's not an overly queer story or too shocking -- though the final climax is intense, it's just part of the formula you come to expect from these stories. But lots of it was familiar in the problems you have as a teenager that don't go away as an adult: what does it mean, how do we make a mark, why don't other people take the same things seriously, when will it feel like we've grown up, what happens when we follow the wrong people, what happens when we realize we're followers and not leaders?
So, it worked for me. While it was ridiculous at times (no one can run eight miles that easily, honestly) it was honest enough in others for me to be thinking about it after I finished.
4 stars.