peeled_grape's reviews
158 reviews

Ambitiously human and admirably honest. I had to set this book down after several sections to let them sink in all the way. This one was gutting in ways I didn't expect. It is stunning and clever and moving. I think I am mostly speechless.

Y'all, I got 200 pages into this book and never felt like it started. It's theoretically great, and I like the idea of it -- lots of paradoxes to chew on, it's extremely clever -- but in practice, it's not good. I appreciate what it's trying to do, but I couldn't focus on this book enough to finish it. It makes its point in the first chapter and then does it again and again and again. So repetitious. Like, I get it. I get it! Can we move on now!

I can tell this writing is super high quality, but it was hard for me to get through. I had to focus very hard to not space out while reading parts of this (though, admittedly, I have a short attention span, and this is likely more of a me problem than anything else). The stories I did get through were great. They all blend into each other a little, and I found it hard to separate them when I was done. I can tell Blackburn knows what she's doing, but it wasn't for me.

For me, this was almost comically depressing. I kept thinking of that John Mulaney skit with the “God can’t hear you” joke. It didn’t rip my heart out the way I wanted it to, and that may have been why—I just wasn’t sucked in to the horror of the world. I applaud this for keeping my attention as well as it did—it was colorless and bleak and there is no plot. I could not figure out why I couldn’t put it down for long. I am in love with all of the dialogue, and I both love and hate the way this is written.

I have a soft spot for satires, and this is the best one I've read. I love its Tralfamadorian subplot and the ways Vonnegut has made it relevant to the main plot. I love the leaps through time. I love how observant it is, which you can see on a micro level. In all, it is beautiful, and deeply satisfying. It manages to avoid any sort of preachiness, which is hard to do in a satire, without compromising its critique. Sometimes, satires also lose its story while trying to make a point, which also isn't an issue with Vonnegut. It is honest and moving and deceptively simple. This has made it into my all-time favorites list.

This book came at the recommendation of my younger brother, and it surprised me. A lot. For the most part, it was your typical YA book, and I think the general premise of it is unrealistic. It took me two tries to get past the beginning, where everything is getting set up. The last third of this book, though, is incredible. More specifically, I'm thinking of one chapter/section near the end which goes into more depth of the "unwinding" process, and I read the entire thing with my hand over my mouth. Then, of course, I tore through the rest of the book, which is what everything was leading to, and it was great. I think about that one section regularly, though, and I admire it quite a bit.

There is nothing new and original about this book. I wasn't fond of any part of it. The narrator is advertised to be unreliable, but because she ends up being right about everything in the end and recognizes anything that distorts her perceptions, I would argue that she's actually pretty reliable? Even the things that would make her unreliable aren't original at ALL. And I don't like her. The narrator was in no way likable or enjoyable. The end of the book felt like cheating, and it was dissatisfying.

On a less serious note, the journalist in me thinks that no one should be able to use this many semicolons and get away with it. Also, in case you didn't know, A.J. Finn is actually Dan Mallory, and if I knew that before I got the book, I wouldn't have bought it at all. I would actually recommend staying away from this book, both because neither the author nor the book are good.

Why did this become a classic? I'm confused why this book even exists. I have so many issues with it. The book's central theme of being opposed to the censorship of knowledge is fantastic, but Bradbury says this while meaning something else. I don't know anything about Ray Bradbury, but I can 100% guarantee that he'd be the kind of guy that thinks his First Amendment rights are being infringed upon because he can't say racist shit, the kind of guy that thinks that the generations younger than him are "too sensitive" because they call him out on it. He'd be the old guy who goes on a Facebook rant about how cell phones are ruining society. This whole book runs on these ideas. Even if I did agree with what he was saying, the points he's trying to make are weak and ineffective. They're too broad and too disconnected to make coherent sense. There is no worldbuilding, the plot is a mess, and the characters are indismissably inconsistent. The irony here is that every plot move and character shift is for instant gratification--it looks cool, but it's empty. This book deserves the biggest "ok, boomer" and none of the attention it's gotten.