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ruthlessly 's review for:
Our Beautiful Boys
by Sameer Pandya
Once again, this is definitely a book that centres around things I absolutely love: here, whether three boys committed an assault against another boy and how far they're each responsible for what happened. The boys are of different ethnic backgrounds -- white, Indian, Latino -- and it brings in each of their families too, giving them POVs, and using all of this to explore ideas around masculinity, race and class. I love that shit.
This has interesting ideas but its execution left me cold. The characterisations didn't seem complete or authentic to me. I wasn't won over by any of them. By the end of the book, I could tell you very little about what motivated each of them even though that is ostensibly what the book is trying to get. Furthermore, this does my least favourite POV thing that I complain about all the fucking time wherein it swaps to another POV mid-paragraph because idk, Vikram looks at his mum who then goes on about whatever she's thinking and then she sees his dad, who then takes the reins. Just a really annoying way to show different perspectives, imo. If they're important enough to give them a true POV to try and give further insight, then their sections should be structured better.
I finished this because there was a mystery at the heart of it but it's easy to guess, the characters lack believable psychological depth and its attempts at catharsis fall far from the mark. Not very good.
This has interesting ideas but its execution left me cold. The characterisations didn't seem complete or authentic to me. I wasn't won over by any of them. By the end of the book, I could tell you very little about what motivated each of them even though that is ostensibly what the book is trying to get. Furthermore, this does my least favourite POV thing that I complain about all the fucking time wherein it swaps to another POV mid-paragraph because idk, Vikram looks at his mum who then goes on about whatever she's thinking and then she sees his dad, who then takes the reins. Just a really annoying way to show different perspectives, imo. If they're important enough to give them a true POV to try and give further insight, then their sections should be structured better.
I finished this because there was a mystery at the heart of it but it's easy to guess, the characters lack believable psychological depth and its attempts at catharsis fall far from the mark. Not very good.