reubenalbatross's Reviews (521)

 

If I read each of these stories independently, I definitely would have enjoyed them a lot more. My issue with this collection is that all of the stories follow a very similar circular narrative, and after two or three versions of it I got pretty bored.
 
I pushed through to the story 'Re-birth', as reviews state that’s the best story, and I'm glad I did because it was great. However, I can't bring myself to read any further anticipating that it would just be the same cyclical stories over and over again. The last one I read was one good, we'll leave it at that.
 
My short reviews for the stories I read are as follows:
 
What We Have Here - 4 stars
Definitely fucked, but ended a little abruptly so was an unsatisfying ending.

Theresa - 5 stars
Fucking heartbreaking.
 
Blackbird - 2.5 stars
Kinda good, but very similar to 'Theresa'.
 
The Sisters - 3.5 stars
Creepy, but left a lot unexplained for me to be fully convinced by the story.
 
Peeping Tommy - 3.75 stars
Really did creep me out, but the ending came out of the blue and I felt like nothing had led up to it.
 
Becca - 3 stars
This is where I started to realise all of the stories felt very similar. In isolation, this would have been pretty good, but was again the same cyclical story that was feeling overdone already.
 
Sleeptalker - 3.25 stars
Once again, a great concept, but the same cyclical story.
 
Re-birth - 5 stars
OUTSTANDING. Glad I didn't DNF before this one. It is still the same cyclical narrative, but done incredibly well. 
 
Overall rating for read stories - 3.75 stars 

I was expecting big things from this book, and unfortunately it did not deliver. 

It was written in such a remote and clinical way (though the letters from Nettie did improve this a little bit) and told so quickly that I struggled to feel anything for the characters. Yes, the situations were awful, but I didn’t feel anything, apart from one brief moment towards the end. I imagine the remote writing style was done purposely to show how damaged/closed off Celie was, especially towards the beginning, but it just meant that I didn’t feel connected to the characters or story. 

Likewise, I felt there was a lot of context missing from the story, which made it impossible for me to become invested in the characters. The huge time jumps made it impossible to know how old people were, or how much time had passed. As a result, I couldn’t fully immerse myself in the story because I was constantly trying to work out how old the characters were at a given time, or how much time had passed since the last letter. If these things weren’t relevant to the story, I wouldn’t mind so much, but they were essential to understanding it and the character’s growth properly. 

Similarly, sometimes it was really difficult to work out if a character was black or white. For a book with race as one of the main themes, it really impacted the story when I didn’t know. 

I also just didn’t find the book particularly interesting. Maybe the discussions in it were more groundbreaking when it was written 40 years ago, but now none of it feels new, or to me particularly impactful. I’ve read about or been involved with conversations about all of this before, so not understanding/enjoying the story, and not finding new point of views in the conversations it presented, meant I didn’t really get anything from this read. 

I was also annoyed by quite a few things in the novel, some of which I’ve detailed below: 

-        Having no quotation marks was so annoying. I spent half my time going back over passages I’d read to make sense of it. Some authors are able to make no quotation marks feel seamless, unfortunately that wasn’t the case in this book. 

-        Nettie mentions English people having crooked teeth – “so crooked”… English people do not have a genetic disposition to crooked teeth, and only recently has there been a difference between US and UK teeth because the US is obsessed with unnecessary dental work. I was just infuriated this was included, as it isn’t based in fact at all. 

-        There were too much ‘praise God’ vibes for me. The book did nothing but praise missionaries, and they were only ever seen as a force for good. Walker seemed to ignore all of the negative effects missionaries have had (and still do) on indigenous communities. 

-        Two thirds into the book, Celie goes back to calling Mary Agnes ‘Squeak’, even as she’s literally writing that she wants to be called Mary? This just pissed me off. 

Overall, a really disappointing and somewhat lacklustre read. I was hopeful for something more, but I just couldn’t get invested in the story or characters, and didn’t discover anything new while reading.  

I'm sad that I felt the need to DNF this, but I just wasn't enjoying my time. I read Volumes 1-3 a few ago and remembered really enjoying them, but these haven't lived up the them. I don't know if I've changed, or if the quality is different. 

All of the stories felt pretty pedestrian. Even the weirder ones were mainly boring day-to-day stuff, with little inserts of horror. 

I rated the stories I finished as follows, but the high ratings feel generous looking back. I think I was rating with too much optimism...

Volume 4 -  

'The Body Politic' - 5 stars - nice and scary
'The Inhuman Condition' - 3 stars - was interesting, but the ending made no sense to me at all...
'Revelations' - 3.5 stars - a different kind of horror, and not one that did much for me
'Down, Satan! - 4 stars - creepy, but I wanted more descriptions of the gross
'The Age of Desire' - 5 stars - I'm sorry, what?

Volume 5 -

'The Forbidden' - 2 stars - maybe 2 pages out of 37 were actually scary/of interest. The rest was pretty mundane - just a posho woman walking around an estate 

I'm not sure I gained anything from reading this, but it was an enjoyable and engaging read.

On starting this book, I was immediately captivated by the writing, and intrigued by cool concepts - both the reading feelings from books, and the story within a story (the latter of which I'm a sucker for). However, I have had to stop reading it because what the actual fuck??
 
My first red flag, is that the present-day parts of the book are set in 1984. Ashlyn mentions seeing a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, a book that was published 5 years later in 1989... Such an EASY fact to check, yet clearly no-one involved in the book gave a shit.  
 
My biggest gripe with the book, however, is that Hemi is such a goddamn CREEP, yet his actions are only ever seen as romantic?? Not just by Belle, but by Ashlyn, and according to reviews I've read every single other person who’s read this book? I'm truly baffled. Without ever having seen Belle, he manipulates his way into TWO parties he shouldn't be at, had completely deranged obsessive and intense thoughts about her by the third time they met, and knew WAY too much about her life as if he'd been researching and spying on her for years. And it's all viewed as romantic????? 
 
When I started getting creep vibes, I thought the book was going to be about that - a creepy stalker guy preying on a sheltered, emotionally abused woman. A woman who surely can't know what she actually wants in life or properly stand up for herself because she's only ever been treated as an object. And he’s just doing the EXACT same thing to her and she doesn't even notice. What the fuck is going on here??
 
I cannot read any more of this awful tripe. If the point of the book was commentary about his creepiness, good, I would have continued reading. But the fact that we're meant to think this is romantic is truly depraved. People need to get a grip. 

Well, I read this...
 
It was actually hilarious how closed-minded Prince Bifalt was in this. As he says himself, he has little intelligence or imagination, so it makes sense that he's unable to be empathetic throughout the WHOLE book. 
 
And this brings me on to my next point - it was basically just a rehashing of Thomas Covenant. Namely in there being a reluctant anti-hero who needs to learn major life lessons to save the world, while also being held semi-hostage in a fortress, having information withheld from him by calm, manipulative sorcerers.  
 
It was also pretty misogynistic for a book written in 2017... For the first 200 pages the only women were servants and/or sexual objects. And of course, on the very last page one of them just randomly kisses Bifalt after he's had zero relationship with her. Not to say misogyny is acceptable in 80s fantasy, but it’s a thing everyone is fully aware of these days, so is even less excusable in modern fantasy. 
 
There was also some pretty glaring racism - the narrator describes people who I assume were meant to look like East Asian people as having 'yellow skin' - "Black, brown, and yellow skins mingled with white"... Not to mention the word 'savages' being used in reference to Native American type characters WAY too often. Bifalt was corrected to not use it, but then both he and the narrator continue to use the word. Just not necessary, especially as the characters weren't ‘savage’ at all. 
 
Even ignoring all this problematic stuff, it was just an infuriating read for the most part. The constant withholding of information + Bifalt being a raging arsehole just wasn't that fun to read. It felt different somehow in the Thomas Covenant series, or maybe I've just grown as a reader and person. 
 
I was actually intrigued by the story, and did need to know how it ended so finished the book, but there were too many red flags for me to continue this series. 

This book had so much promise, and it did live up to it in places, but unfortunately let me down in others. 
 
The insights into the American justice system were damning, and the real life inserts in the footnotes made the message so much more powerful. 
 
Some parts of the novel were so powerful, disturbing, and thought provoking, especially Simon J Craft's entries, almost overwhelmingly so. However, other parts verged on boring. The pace was a little strange. 
 
Also, some elements of the worldbuilding were unclear, obstructively so, especially about the game mechanics. Like why the BlackOuts? It wasn't explained why they happened, and they made no sense to me. I could understand not wanting to show the public some of the footage to keep an element of intrigue and surprise, but surely they would keep filming the players all the time for at least the producers to keep an eye on what they're doing? 
 
Additionally, I really struggled with the descriptions of the fighting scenes, I could never fully understand or picture them in my head. The writing being slightly ambiguous worked for the rest of the book, but was annoying in the fight scenes. It really disrupted the intensity of them. And the fact that the book ended on a fight scene that I had to read over and over to understand felt pretty anticlimactic to me, especially as the ending was very predictable. 

For how strong the rest of the book was, it was an underwhelming ending - I was hoping for some of the intense emotions I'd felt in the rest of it. I think Adjei-Brenyah was going for a shock, brutal ending, but it didn't work for me because I was just wading through the fight scene. And a bad ending really does sour a book for me. 
 
Overall, I think this was a good book that tried to do too much, that I enjoyed but wasn't wowed by. I wanted more of everything, as nothing quite felt complete. I wanted more from the public, more about different experimental prisons, more from the markers of the games. Instead, I was left wanting and unsatisfied.  

This is a really powerful book, and I really appreciated what it had to say. It was written with so much heart and awareness. And for the most part it was really good, but there were a few things that took me out of the power of the story.
 
One was that throughout the whole book I had no idea what the difference was between Benji and Bobo - they were the same person in my head. And this was a wider issue of the book - there are so many characters, and I didn't ever feel like I had a grasp of who everyone was. After they were initially introduced, there was almost no differentiation for a lot of them, and they just kinda merged into a blob of a background character in my head. For a long time I thought that Kevin was Peter's kid. 
 
I believe largely because of this above point, the ending felt off to me. Going through each character and finishing off their stories didn't have much weight, because I didn't have a grasp of who half of them were. It felt rushed and anticlimactic in a way. 
 
Also, Maya becoming a

world famous musician

was so bloody cheesy. The least authentic feeling part of the whole book.  

Though I has a pretty 'good' time reading this, I don't think I'll continue with the series. A standalone was enough for me. 

Wow. Just wow.

This was a LOT to read as someone who spent a lot of time in younger life feeling/being inferior to others while still being 'accomplished' - it really hit home.  

What a beautiful, rich, and powerful book. 

I do not know how to feel about this book. My mind tells me it was a shitty, nonsensical romance, but my heart kinda liked it. 

The action stuff was all written really engagingly, and I've never been so grossed out by descriptions of gore in a book, even though I read a ton of horror. 

I also related to Sloane a lot - I don't think I've ever seen my nervousness around if someone likes me personified so much in a book. 

But this then brings me around to 'golden boy' Rowan, and how much he's shown as the perfect man, even though his behaviour is crazy toxic. I understand the sub/dom kink, but there's a line, and his possessiveness really went over it. That amount of it is just not sexy - one second he's like 'o wow look at Sloane, the sexy serial killer', the next he can't trust her around an already exploded oven?? And that's a pattern that just kept repeating itself - he had no faith in her at all. AND THEN, to make it even worse,

towards the end he just completely believed that Sloane would abandon him like that and side with David?? What an arsehole. Of course she fucking wouldn't, and there was never any indication that she would. She, on the other hand, had every right to be worried Rowan would fuck off, especially with her valid insecurities. Her insecurity is real and makes sense, his just seems like possessive toxic masculinity and woman ownership. He can't even fathom that she's be making things up to save him? Fuck him.

If this was behaviour that was addressed in the book as toxic, it would have been fine, but it was shown as a 'healthy' part of their relationship, when it was anything but. 

So for the rating - would have been a 4, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a masterpiece or anything. But then we have Rowan the arsehole, so let's bring it down to a 3.25. Feels harsh, but he kinda ruined the book for me.