rickjones's Reviews (1.66k)

I bought this book with the hope that it would introduce me to Eugenides' writing and ultimately push me to finally read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides, yet I was so disinterested and appalled by the plots and characters in these stories that I no longer want to engage with Eugenides' work at all.

The two stories that bookend this collection, "Complainers" and "Fresh Complaint" were least offensive to me and newly published, yet all others were previously accepted by prestigious publications like The New Yorker or Best American Short Stories. It depresses me that these type of stories are considered the pinnacle of American literature. Almost all of them featured miserable, middle aged white men in dissatisfying marriages who are thirsting after wealth or inappropriate relationships. In one, a man replaces semen his former girlfriend consensually obtained and planned to use for her pregnancy with his own. In three others, middle aged men pursue sexual relationships with barely legal young women. In another, a man who described his attraction to his underage intersex patient, later travels to the location of a fictional isolated tribe where pedophilic rituals are institutional, and justifies accepting and submitting to their mores. 

It's not inherently wrong to write stories with immoral characters, but I have no idea what I was supposed to learn intellectually or emotionally from the majority of these. They just repulsed me. The writing style held little appeal for me either. It was typically undescriptive and straightforward, with very few passages that felt interesting or wise to me. I would never recommend this collection to anyone, unless I hated them and wanted them to experience psychic distress. It may be the worst book I will read this year.

While this book is pulse-pounding and well written, I wish I had never read it. For me, it was too emotionally harrowing to read a story about a girl who is sold into sex slavery where she is never rescued by the end of the novel. There's no end to the tension by the final lines, so it left me feeling really uneasy. I don't think I would recommend reading this, as I imagine most people I know would feel similarly disturbed by it.

Let the Right One In is a winding, intricately planned horror story that examines vampire lore in a fresh way. At the heart of the novel is the understanding that life, death, love and everything else in between them feel different when you are young and adulthood still looms far on the horizon. 

While the first half of the book is rather slow-paced, I never felt that it was tedious to read. This pleasantly surprised me since I typically avoid books of this length. As the story progresses, we are introduced to a variety of characters whose lives start to converge due to Eli's innocent yet ruthless will to survive. Lindqvist provides a humanity to each of these characters, even the ones who are most despicable or only show up on a few pages. Any scene from Håkan's perspective was disgusting to read, though he is thankfully tortured throughout the narrative and never given a moment of peace. It was definitely rewarding to envision him growing more and more grotesquely wounded throughout the corse of the book. 

The second half of the novel was paced quicker, and by the last hundred pages I felt it impossible to put the book down as I prepared to go into work. Though horrific and mysteriously worrying, the book is given a satisfying ending in line with the themes of youth providing a film over the reality of violence and toxic romance. This was a unique, memorable horror story that deserves the international interest that has swirled around it since its release.

This was a surprisingly engaging novel that I read in the course of a night. I couldn't bear to part with the characters until I knew if they'd snare justice for what was being done to Essie. Since I read it so quickly I initially didn't notice many of the novel's flaws, but after thinking about it more I am frustrated with some of the ways the characters were portrayed. 

First of all, it was courageous and necessary for Weir to write a novel that multiply exposes the ways in which evangelical families inflict harm on their children. The parents in this story are not relentlessly evil, they have some level of affection for their children. Yet they place them into situations where their mental and physical health is compromised, and look the other way or deny that the harm is occurring, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. I found this to be a fairly realistic portrayal of some of the relentlessly evangelical families I have known personally or heard about from the children that escaped. 

However, I thought it was negligent to not depict how Essie, Liberty or Roarke distanced themselves from their family's bigoted beliefs, especially since Essie in particular didn't seem to have much access to information that was not monitored by her parents. Disowning these poisonous beliefs taught as moral truths is a process that takes time and is necessary to living the rest of one's life without demeaning others. I just didn't believe that these characters could have emerged from this process so quickly, and from simply knowing a few people who questioned them. The bigoted evangelical young people I knew in school were relentless with their belief system, even when they asserted that they didn't really hate the individual people in groups they disrespected. If they ever unwound these thoughts from their minds, I doubt they would be able to do so successfully in a short amount of time, and while those ideas were still being preached to them. If I'm wrong, that would be wonderful. Yet I wish Weir dug deeper into the process of unlearning bigoted ideas, since the expression of them was an important piece to understanding why the Hicks family was so dangerous not only to their children or town, but to the entire nation. 

It's not my place to speak on the depiction of incestuous sexual abuse, since I'm not a survivor of it. Yet I feel that Weir's story only narrowly avoided sensationalization. Scenes where we learned who abused Essie, where her and Roarke were placed in situations where they had to pretend they weren't aware what this abuser had done, and where we learned the amount of people who were culpable for its continuation seemed intentionally written to be as dramatic as possible. Whether this offends or validates survivors of similar abuse, I can't say. The book is extremely tense and quick-paced, with much of the drama leading up to the reveal of the differing traumas the characters' parents had allowed them to suffer. I do think some of these themes could have been written with more sensitivity and depth, yet I commend Weir for telling stories about difficult subjects that many people shy away from acknowledging. 

The Devil's Mountain is a short yet slow-burning horror story that drips with atmosphere. I enjoyed imagining Harding's rich descriptions of the eerie, brutalist architecture and how it had been vandalized and neglected in the years since its abandonment. He writes Dylan and Nikki with high-spirited harmony, which increases the horror, since the reader already knows something horrible is about to happen to them. My only criticism is that I would have liked more description as to what that horrible thing actually was, since my imagination had been drifting to many possibilities. In all, I thought this was a unique and engaging story, with an environment that I would love to see depicted visually, since it was so interesting to try and picture it myself. 

Whew... where to start... Jennette McCurdy's candor and skill with creating scenes rich with emotion and environment make this book an engaging read that felt impossible to put down.  I find her admiration of "umless" people pleasantly ironic, since her writing is presented in a quick-moving, straightforward manner where her words are not cushioned by insecure pauses. 

I acknowledge that McCurdy has taken a huge risk by writing this book, but it is one that will hopefully pay off. One should never underestimate the difficulty of rebuilding your life's foundation and sense of identity after coming to understand that it had been defined by an abusive relationship with a caretaker, that warped into an abusive relationship with your body and own needs. Our society still has much work to do to improve understanding and cessation of abusive dynamics between parents and children that still involve a level of codependency that looks, and may feel like, a loving relationship. The fact that McCurdy has made such a dramatic recovery in her sense of self and eating disorder so soon after coming to terms with her abuse is a testament to the determination she always had, and can now exercise to make herself happy, instead of her mother. 

While McCurdy may never escape the limelight, I hope she can find some peace in knowing that she will now be known by millions as a multi-talented woman with wisdom, grit and the courage to let her honesty empower others in similar dysfunctional relationships with their caretakers or their bodies. The horrors she endured as a survivor of complex maternal abuse and as a child performer have affected young people for generations, but few have shared her bravery to dissect and expose the details of these experiences the way she has.

This was a wise, lyrical novel written in both straightforward prose and dialect-rich dialogue. The characters in this novel have a variety of strengths, weaknesses, and ways of living in a world that is often merciless to them. One thing that struck me is how much humor is in this novel, laughing with each other cements friendships between the men Janie knows, and represents an alteration in her sense of freedom once she's able to similarly engage with them and tell her own humourous stories. Throughout the novel Janie lives marriages that revolve around work and duty, wealth and prestige, and finally, taking pleasure in life and the people you're with. None of these marriages are perfect, and none fully define Janie. Yet her last marriage gives her what she was searching for as a girl, a love that leads her to blossom and truly feel appreciation for the world she lives in. This was an engaging, devastating novel that deserves its place as a legend in literary canon. 

This collection wasn't exactly what I had hoped, the characters are often simplistic, with only a few traits to distinguish them and the ways they interpret the world. However, Doerr has an abundant skill for describing the natural world and for using these descriptions to set tone.