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A review by erine
The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill
3.0
Thank you to NetGalley for an eArc of this book.
An incredibly deliberate and methodical story, akin to a slow-moving, creaking waterwheel. There’s beauty, there’s repetition, there are reliable outcomes, and sometimes you just want things to move a bit faster. The overwhelming feeling I had when reading was pent-up frustration.
Let me put it this way: if you are exasperated at people who view the current pandemic as an individual problem and grit your teeth as we drop community mitigations, or if your heart sinks as you see people get sucked into propagandist and conspiracist rabbit holes where they live in a pit of cynical fear and suspicion and greed, then this book may offer you more of the same frustration. I think many readers also see hope in this story, but I don’t know that I can translate the kindness and clarity that emerges (finally) in this story into the real world.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here about acts of kindness, about thinking for yourself, about neighbors and community. But the story itself is a long, slow rollout that only picks up the pace in the last third or so.
Ultimately, I enjoyed this, but it echoed reality in ways that were not a relief for me, and instead added to my discouraged feelings about the self-centered, short-sighted world we are living in.
An incredibly deliberate and methodical story, akin to a slow-moving, creaking waterwheel. There’s beauty, there’s repetition, there are reliable outcomes, and sometimes you just want things to move a bit faster. The overwhelming feeling I had when reading was pent-up frustration.
Let me put it this way: if you are exasperated at people who view the current pandemic as an individual problem and grit your teeth as we drop community mitigations, or if your heart sinks as you see people get sucked into propagandist and conspiracist rabbit holes where they live in a pit of cynical fear and suspicion and greed, then this book may offer you more of the same frustration. I think many readers also see hope in this story, but I don’t know that I can translate the kindness and clarity that emerges (finally) in this story into the real world.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here about acts of kindness, about thinking for yourself, about neighbors and community. But the story itself is a long, slow rollout that only picks up the pace in the last third or so.
Ultimately, I enjoyed this, but it echoed reality in ways that were not a relief for me, and instead added to my discouraged feelings about the self-centered, short-sighted world we are living in.