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sunflowermagpie 's review for:
Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses
by Kristen O'Neal
I really wanted to love this book. Chronic illness meets werewolves sounds amazing. But this book did not work for me. All of the characters except Priya and her family were very annoying to me, including the one that has the same chronic illness as I do. And they also talk in that unreadably cringe tumblr-speak that’s embarrassing to read actual grown adult characters speaking in. It stressed me out to read 400 pages of it. Because of that, this book gave me intense secondhand embarrassment from the moment I picked it up. I saw another reviewer describe it as “painfully unfunny” which I think sums it up well.
All of these twentysomething characters sounded like middle schoolers, or like a bad caricature of what older generations think Gen Z is like. Also, it was so so uncomfortable to me to read this group chat where 20+ year olds are giving advice to emotionally vulnerable/suicidal high schoolers. WTF?? It genuinely made me feel so gross to read it. Not to mention that they’re not medical professionals but spend most of the group chat giving out medical advice and diagnoses to strangers and minors. So that mess was about 3/4 of the book.
It’s a shame because all of these things distracted from the story, which was actually pretty interesting. I also appreciated the representation of being chronically ill, even though I don’t think it was done as well as it could have been. The chronic illness I have (migraine) was represented so poorly that it genuinely made me angry, but I can’t speak to the other ones. [ETA: It seems from reading the acknowledgements that the author's ide of research was just asking random people on reddit questions. I think that explains a lot of the issues with the chronic illness rep here.] The other main flaw for me was that I felt like the book didn’t fully commit to the horror or the comedy of its premise, so it just ended up feeling pretty middle of the road.
I really struggled to get through it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Such a waste of a cool premise. More, better werewolf books please.
All of these twentysomething characters sounded like middle schoolers, or like a bad caricature of what older generations think Gen Z is like. Also, it was so so uncomfortable to me to read this group chat where 20+ year olds are giving advice to emotionally vulnerable/suicidal high schoolers. WTF?? It genuinely made me feel so gross to read it. Not to mention that they’re not medical professionals but spend most of the group chat giving out medical advice and diagnoses to strangers and minors. So that mess was about 3/4 of the book.
It’s a shame because all of these things distracted from the story, which was actually pretty interesting. I also appreciated the representation of being chronically ill, even though I don’t think it was done as well as it could have been. The chronic illness I have (migraine) was represented so poorly that it genuinely made me angry, but I can’t speak to the other ones. [ETA: It seems from reading the acknowledgements that the author's ide of research was just asking random people on reddit questions. I think that explains a lot of the issues with the chronic illness rep here.] The other main flaw for me was that I felt like the book didn’t fully commit to the horror or the comedy of its premise, so it just ended up feeling pretty middle of the road.
I really struggled to get through it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Such a waste of a cool premise. More, better werewolf books please.