Reviews with content warning for Self harm - Die geheime Geschichte

Generally enjoyed this. There's just about every content warning you could imagine, but they weren't being painted as healthy or good things. It was dark, but not in a way that made me feel slimy. I think it's meant to be chilling, though. The writing was magnetic. Good sentence structure and word choices. Lots of dialogue, but not in an intolerably slow way

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fulan's review against another edition

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adventurous lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

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

5.0

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biab00's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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daybreakreads's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.25

The first 90% of this book: overhyped, poorly researched (details that were factually inaccurate; Plano, CA is two hours’ driving distance from Disneyland, he couldn’t have seen the fireworks from his house, one of the characters reads a book written by the “Persians” which was in Arabic — odd for a book so focused on foreign language, etc.), rather pretentious.

Last 10%: twist ending was interesting, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t justify the 22 hours I spent listening to the audiobook. The author was the voice actor, and the voice she used for Bunny was incredibly irritating.

Interesting notes:
- this is a slow burn. Doesn’t pick up at all until ~50%. The writing style is intriguing
- none of the characters (even side ones) are “good guys”
- there’s a ton of random racist/antisemetic/homophobic comments, but they’re usually a one-off thing. The only exception to this was 3/4 of the way through there was a recurring trend of anti-Arab things that served no point to the overall plot whatsoever. It was odd for a book written in the 90s. There was a fake country full of “jihadist terrorists” mentioned several times, “sand [n word]” used against a Palestinian (who was only written for a brief moment in which he was yelling as the “angry Arab man” stereotype, “Arab” and “Arabic” were used incorrectly, general xenophobic remarks, etc. And then it just randomly stopped.

As a Muslim the last thing just came across a bit ridiculous more than anything. I didn’t see the relevance, or the reason to focus significantly more on that than the other marginalized groups.

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