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nehaanna's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
I’m not entirely sure what this book is attempting to accomplish. This is literary fiction with a speculative aspect and a fantasy-esque twist that fails to make any sense until the last 50 pages and is so poorly strung together. This book fails to draw the reader in, preferring to use complicated time jumps, stream of consciousness type writing, and sloppy philosophical waxing to make some point. Sprinkled along the way are references to historical injustices towards minority populations with reference to recent historical events of the 2020s. However, the social commentary is poorly done in my opinion. Nothing in this book seems to be executed well, everything falls abysmally short of the author’s well-meaning intentions for what this book could have been.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Gun violence, Hate crime, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Sexual content, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
Moderate: Alcoholism, Blood, Religious bigotry, Suicide attempt, Alcohol, War, and Pandemic/Epidemic
caseythereader's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Bullying, Confinement, Death, Fatphobia, Gun violence, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Suicide, Violence, Xenophobia, Blood, Kidnapping, Grief, Car accident, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Alcohol, and Injury/Injury detail
beanjoles's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
A tedious read, which is a shame because the summary made it seem very cool. I got way more out of reading the summary than the entire book tbh.
The best part of this book is the expressive and interesting writing style. Characterization was not very good — there was a lot of Telling and next to no Showing. That isn’t unexpected in a novel that depends on first-person narration, but at many points I felt like I was reading Lou’s collected essays about her life experiences rather than going through the experiences with her. Lou constantly seems disconnected from her actions and environment, and this makes it difficult for a reader to care about them either.
The dispassionate descriptions of her day-to-day life were boring. There were teases of interesting things to come (I kept waiting for Sarah and Lou to have a more obvious overall aside from Sarah being future-Lou ) but this never really paid off. The last 20% of the novel finally had some things happen, but I didn’t feel they were well explained or explored. This would have been a much more compelling story if some of these elements were mixed in with the base story about Lou.
Finally, it felt like there were a lot of bits of modern commentary that, while important, were jarringly out of place in 1930s LA. I’d have expected them to come from Sarah rather than Lou. The result is that I never felt like Lou was an authentic character. This is one area in the imbalance between showing and telling was particularly evident. Had we seen Lou develop her opinions and positions in response to events it would have been more interesting and realistic.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to others, but I wouldn’t rule out reading more by Natasha Deon. She’s clearly a talented writer and the concept was there. This story just wasn’t executed well.
The best part of this book is the expressive and interesting writing style. Characterization was not very good — there was a lot of Telling and next to no Showing. That isn’t unexpected in a novel that depends on first-person narration, but at many points I felt like I was reading Lou’s collected essays about her life experiences rather than going through the experiences with her. Lou constantly seems disconnected from her actions and environment, and this makes it difficult for a reader to care about them either.
The dispassionate descriptions of her day-to-day life were boring. There were teases of interesting things to come (I kept waiting for Sarah and Lou to have a more obvious overall aside from
Finally, it felt like there were a lot of bits of modern commentary that, while important, were jarringly out of place in 1930s LA. I’d have expected them to come from Sarah rather than Lou. The result is that I never felt like Lou was an authentic character. This is one area in the imbalance between showing and telling was particularly evident. Had we seen Lou develop her opinions and positions in response to events it would have been more interesting and realistic.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to others, but I wouldn’t rule out reading more by Natasha Deon. She’s clearly a talented writer and the concept was there. This story just wasn’t executed well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, and Xenophobia
isabelgalupo's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I got frustrated with the small, sometimes repetitive scope of the main 1930’s story because of the larger implications of immortal life; I wanted to know a lot more about the main characters others lives. I also found the sci-fi exposition/rules of the world info dump at the end of the novel to be really rushed because we focused so much on the day to day, super grounded world for the majority of the book leading up to the conclusion. I get that focusing on the “mundane” aspects of Lou’s lifetime was *the point* of the novel and sometimes that was effective and thought provoking, but it felt like the author wanted to have her cake and eat it to by interspersing narration from the future, and then not paying off any of the information she presented in these sections.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Xenophobia
Moderate: Racial slurs and Religious bigotry