Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

4 reviews

justnerissa's review against another edition

emotional reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

***Contains a Spoiler***

Smith has clearly honed her craft when it comes to character. Maybe Swing Time was an attempt at doing something different with plot. I found it frustrating that the narrator is slightly obsessed with her childhood friend Tracey, yet we never actually hear from Tracey. 

And I didn't quite understand what was going on at the beginning of the book once we got to the end. Were people attacking the narrator because they saw that video from when they were kids?

It was an interesting thing to have happen to a person; an interesting story to tell, sure, but it's almost like the narrative choice here avoids actually telling the story outright. You get the story but as a side to the narrator telling us about all the people in her life and how they people it.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Sexual assault and Death of parent

jojo_'s review against another edition

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Cancer, Racism, Sexual assault, Toxic relationship, Toxic friendship, and Classism

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Death of parent, Abandonment, and Colonisation

Minor: Drug use, Infidelity, Slavery, Antisemitism, Medical content, and Colonisation

velveteencactus's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

I think if you go into this book looking for a main character you can root for, you're going to be dissapointed. Because the main character definitely has some of her own personality and complexity, but where she as the narrator and the book really shine is her (and Zadie Smith's) sociological observations about race, class, and colonialism in modern day Britain (or arguably modern-day Western countries as a whole). Zadie Smith has a lot of insightful observations about these topics and uses this novel and its characters to explore those themes. The novel is the strongest when those observations are tied to the deeply personal, the main character's direct relationships with Tracey, her mother and father, and Hawa. The novel started off strong with the exploration of the close, personal, and tempetuous relationship between Tracey and the narrator. The relationship between the two illustrated deep tensions created by differences in economic, social, and cultural capital between two young girls who on the surface should be very similar. However, the latter part of the middle of the novel begain to drag a bit for me when the narration got too far abstracted from these relationships, but the ending really picked up for me again as the main character returns to those relationships in the beginning that initially drove the story so successfully. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Toxic relationship and Death of parent

bookedbymadeline's review

challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Cancer, Emotional abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexual content, Slavery, Toxic relationship, and Death of parent

Moderate: Drug use, Misogyny, Sexual assault, and Violence

Minor: Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Homophobia, Infidelity, Self harm, Vomit, and Antisemitism