3.5

content warnings: homophobia, violence, murder
representation: main m/m relationship

“The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.”

Okay, I've decided to rewrite my original review because after listening to the audiobook version of this I liked it a lot more. The first time I read it I thought giving it 3 stars was way too generous, now I'm bumping it up to a 3.5.

We all know the story so I'm not even going to bother explaining it to you. The important thing for you to know is that the movie is one of my favourite film's ever made and it means a whole fucking lot to me. I stand by my original assessment that this is still fairly rushed and that it being turned into a feature-length film that fleshed out a lot of things just said in throwaway comments was the best thing for it. Despite that, the story made me feel a lot more things the second time around and I was able to appreciate how beautiful Annie Proulx's writing is.

I still think that people who have seen the movie can get a lot more out of this than those who haven't, but I would still recommend it. I think that the audiobook is probably the way to go; it's only an hour long and the narrator does a really good job.