Reviews tagging 'Murder'

Vanilla by Mona Kabbani

1 review

madarauchiha's review

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1.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

I don't even know how I found this book. I guess storygraph recced it to me? Ok. From the summary I figured this was an edgy pedo horror abuse shit and I was irght. There's child abuse but not outright pedo shit a la CSA. Alright there's some overt pedo shit wiht he infantilization of a adult woman and her being groomed for her entire life. The first half of the book is the villain and his victim. The rest of the book is the victim wandering around being 'free' and us getting info dumps on who the villain is and how he got to this point. And I do mean info dumps. POV switches and we get a info dump of who they are and their backstory and how they are involved with the villain. and then we get serendipitous crossed paths of characters and there's never really an tension. The villains plots are not in danger of being foiled, and I think that's why the book flounders for me. 

The writing was decent. I thought the pacing was off. It was fine at the start, switched POV and started dragging real bad. I had zero investment with any of the characters, personally. They were incredibly one dimensional. I think the mc(?) Vanilla was trying to poke into a second dimension, but the book never really followed through with this.

The plot twist ending was... ok. Not out of no where, you know from the start what the villain guy wanted to do. The ending with the kid was. Idk. I think at 80 percent of the way through I justwanted to see what the finale was. I lost interest. I think there's definitely themes of generational abuse and what not but again, I don't care enough to thnk about it.

There's a lot of sexual violence and sexual harassment. Even the city is one dimensional in that this is all there is to the location. You got cis men sexually harassing / assulting women on street who can only run away or cower. Trans people don't exist in this book and I'm glad because jesus christ keep your hands off trans character if this is what you write cis characters like. Anyways we get bland characters all around. It's all very tragic sad trauma porn and I'm struggling to figure out who would like this book. There's no hook. There's not even a mystery that characters uncover. There's silly philosophical shit conveyed by a character that sounds like a emo kid from the early 00s. Omg xd Im dead?? rawr? Where teh thump thump?! 0.0'''

Lesbophobia.
Lesbians, skip this. So basically the one
victim character [vanilla] goes to a party with one of the MCs who promptly ditches her and the MCs friend tiffany leads the Victim upstairs where they lay on a bed and she starts touching Victim. During this touching, Tiffany randomly traumadumps her very tragic past of having a girl best friend who she was dating as a child [teen? it's not clear] and one day her dad catches them doing lesbian stuff [i assume sex] and throws a lesbophobic tantrum, throwing the lesbian gf out of his house. The lesbian gf never shows up to stchool and tiffany assumes she either moved away or died of a hate crime within the time span of being thrown out and going home. Then tiffany makes her move on Victim, who promptly kills her brutally goreily, on screen.


I don't rec this. There's better written more interesting horror out there.

content warnings.
minor incest, whorephobic language, 

medium kidnapping, 

major arson, blood, body horror, child abuse, child death, confinement, emotional abuse, fire, gore, gun violence, injuries, lesbophobia, medical abuse, medical content, miscarriage, murder, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence, unsanitary, violence, whorephobia


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