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kyatic's Reviews (974)
This is the most ridiculous book I have ever read. It is full of people with diarrheoa, grown men moping about and spouting emo soliloquies about their tragic wealthy pasts, and a truly bizarre number of wolf and sheep (and centaur?!) metaphors. Our protagonist is a whiny frat boy pirate with serious internal kink shaming. Our principal love interest is a man with absolutely no redeeming features beyond a love of Plato and a dry wit, who is guilty of hideous crimes, prone to awful violence, and is excused time and time again on the very tenuous justification that he's just, like, damaged. Bit iffy, that.
AND YET I read over 540 pages in the space of 4 days and was absolutely engrossed in this uneven, weird book, sometimes out of an amused desire to see just how much odder it could get and sometimes out of a simple need to see what would happen next, and I'm somewhat confused to discover that I would quite happily wade through the 1,500 or so pages left in the series. I think that says more about me than the book, though.
AND YET I read over 540 pages in the space of 4 days and was absolutely engrossed in this uneven, weird book, sometimes out of an amused desire to see just how much odder it could get and sometimes out of a simple need to see what would happen next, and I'm somewhat confused to discover that I would quite happily wade through the 1,500 or so pages left in the series. I think that says more about me than the book, though.
This book is not well written. One of the two protagonists is unbearable about 60% of the time. The plot is thin.
HOWEVER
It was cute enough and fun enough and different enough that I enjoyed reading it. I vocally responded to parts of it, even if it was just to mutter 'you moron' or 'but why would that happen?', and in my book, it's a very good thing when a text engages me that way. I seldom pick up YA books because they can generally be summed up as 'misunderstood white kids fall in love'. At least this bucked the trend a bit. I'm here for more diversity in YA. I'm here for YA books with a female protagonist who isn't a total manic pixie dream girl.
I'm not quite so here for the Teen rated fanfiction writing style, but we can't have everything.
HOWEVER
It was cute enough and fun enough and different enough that I enjoyed reading it. I vocally responded to parts of it, even if it was just to mutter 'you moron' or 'but why would that happen?', and in my book, it's a very good thing when a text engages me that way. I seldom pick up YA books because they can generally be summed up as 'misunderstood white kids fall in love'. At least this bucked the trend a bit. I'm here for more diversity in YA. I'm here for YA books with a female protagonist who isn't a total manic pixie dream girl.
I'm not quite so here for the Teen rated fanfiction writing style, but we can't have everything.
This was not a perfect book by any means. The Vonnegut references were grating; saying 'so it goes' at the end of a sentence worked in Slaughter Five, but not here. The absence of any contractions made speech stilted ("I want to feel my feet, even if I cannot walk." "I am sure.") The hyperbole at times contrasted with the meticulous research ("My brain had died." "I am brain-dead." - No, it hadn't, and no, you weren't - these are specific medical conditions from which there is no recovery!)
However, the author is a phenomenally talented writer. I dog-ear pages in books that touch me or stand out as striking, and this book has more folded pages than most I've read. The story itself is inspiring and I have absolute admiration for anyone who can survive what this woman survived, and to create such a moving and articulate work out of it. The author manages to put into words experiences which are esoteric and which many of us will (thankfully) not experience, and she brings them into an arena where we can understand them completely. Her language does this. Her primary talent is making language do impossible things.
I will definitely be reading future work by this author, with the single hope that she learns to lean less on other authors - she doesn't need to invoke Vonnegut to be profound. Her own words stand on their own merit. Those are the words I want to read.
However, the author is a phenomenally talented writer. I dog-ear pages in books that touch me or stand out as striking, and this book has more folded pages than most I've read. The story itself is inspiring and I have absolute admiration for anyone who can survive what this woman survived, and to create such a moving and articulate work out of it. The author manages to put into words experiences which are esoteric and which many of us will (thankfully) not experience, and she brings them into an arena where we can understand them completely. Her language does this. Her primary talent is making language do impossible things.
I will definitely be reading future work by this author, with the single hope that she learns to lean less on other authors - she doesn't need to invoke Vonnegut to be profound. Her own words stand on their own merit. Those are the words I want to read.
This book was sort of publicised as a true account of surviving sexual abuse. It's not that, really. A lot of it is really eroticised - which I get, and which makes sense as a trauma response - and I'm not sure that the marketing has been entirely honest about what this book is.