Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kyatic 's review for:
Tell Me I'm Worthless
by Alison Rumfitt
The good:
- the intertextuality. The references to Shirley Jackson in particular were brilliantly done, and I love that this book so firmly situates itself within an existing canon of haunted house narratives. It's meta done well.
- the characterisation. These people feel real, warts and all. Although Alice is much more fleshed out than Ila, I thought it might be a nod to the fact that the author's own life experiences mirror those of Alice, as a white trans woman, rather than those of Ila, who's Jewish and Asian. Ila still feels real, but we're kept slightly at a distance by the third person narrative perspective, which makes for an interesting contrast with the tight first person perspective of Alice's sections.
- the writing. It's just a solid 10/10; there are so many beautiful, horrible, haunting lines here that, if you're the kind of person who dog-ears a book, your copy is going to be trashed. Mine is. Oops.
- the pacing. This one just builds and builds and builds into this horrific, foreboding cataclysm where you know nothing's going to go well, but you still can't look away. It's just so brilliantly done.
- the trigger warnings. I appreciated that the author considered them necessary, especially given the incredibly dark and graphic content of the book.
The bad:
- some of the allegories were so very on-the-nose that they missed the mark for me; it's already obvious that the house is fascist England, and it doesn't really need to be blatantly spelt out in the way that it frequently is here.
- sometimes it wasn't really super clear where we were in time, what with all the flashbacks, but maybe that's deliberate and I'm just being a chump who wants the narrative spelt out for me.
- the ending. Some loved it! I did not. I liked the nod to it at an earlier point in the book, but it felt a little rushed for me. I think what the ending was saying and trying to do made a lot of sense, and could have packed a hell of a punch, but the execution didn't really pay off, in my humble opinion; it felt anticlimactic and tacked on.
The ugly:
- the fact that, after their trauma in the house, Ila becomes a TERF, turning her trauma outward in a way that directly harms other women, but Alice internalises her experience and turns it inward. I don't know! Something just struck me there about how the woman of colour processes her trauma by externalising it and projecting it onto another marginalised group of women, whereas the white woman processes hers in a very interior way. Given the fact that the majority of TERFs are white, I don't know how I felt about it, even though Ila's reasoning behind it is addressed in its own way at the very end. Might need to chew this one over a bit.
- the intertextuality. The references to Shirley Jackson in particular were brilliantly done, and I love that this book so firmly situates itself within an existing canon of haunted house narratives. It's meta done well.
- the characterisation. These people feel real, warts and all. Although Alice is much more fleshed out than Ila, I thought it might be a nod to the fact that the author's own life experiences mirror those of Alice, as a white trans woman, rather than those of Ila, who's Jewish and Asian. Ila still feels real, but we're kept slightly at a distance by the third person narrative perspective, which makes for an interesting contrast with the tight first person perspective of Alice's sections.
- the writing. It's just a solid 10/10; there are so many beautiful, horrible, haunting lines here that, if you're the kind of person who dog-ears a book, your copy is going to be trashed. Mine is. Oops.
- the pacing. This one just builds and builds and builds into this horrific, foreboding cataclysm where you know nothing's going to go well, but you still can't look away. It's just so brilliantly done.
- the trigger warnings. I appreciated that the author considered them necessary, especially given the incredibly dark and graphic content of the book.
The bad:
- some of the allegories were so very on-the-nose that they missed the mark for me; it's already obvious that the house is fascist England, and it doesn't really need to be blatantly spelt out in the way that it frequently is here.
- sometimes it wasn't really super clear where we were in time, what with all the flashbacks, but maybe that's deliberate and I'm just being a chump who wants the narrative spelt out for me.
- the ending. Some loved it! I did not. I liked the nod to it at an earlier point in the book, but it felt a little rushed for me. I think what the ending was saying and trying to do made a lot of sense, and could have packed a hell of a punch, but the execution didn't really pay off, in my humble opinion; it felt anticlimactic and tacked on.
The ugly:
- the fact that, after their trauma in the house, Ila becomes a TERF, turning her trauma outward in a way that directly harms other women, but Alice internalises her experience and turns it inward. I don't know! Something just struck me there about how the woman of colour processes her trauma by externalising it and projecting it onto another marginalised group of women, whereas the white woman processes hers in a very interior way. Given the fact that the majority of TERFs are white, I don't know how I felt about it, even though Ila's reasoning behind it is addressed in its own way at the very end. Might need to chew this one over a bit.