Scan barcode
siebensommer's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
the thing nobody tells you is that suddenly you are a person whose unguarded heart now moves through the world, embedded inside a small and breakable body. You want to stuff it back inside you, almost every day you want to swallow it whole. But you can't, and day by day it gets bigger, more unwieldy.
Making a play is like this. It is only different in that your heart, which is now moving in the world outside of you, does not reside in the body of a singular creature. It resides inside the bodies of a strange troupe of individuals who have signed up for this ritual. Who, by agreement, have become something precious and unnamable. You will love these people savagely, beyond language, for the moment in time in which all of you are bound to each other. If they love you similarly, it will be with similar caveats.
There is no intimacy like the intimacy of breathing life into something together, mingling breath. There's nothing like sharing creation. For the months in which we are assembled, the only people we feel connected to are the ones who joined us inside this world. There might be a legal contract that says we have all agreed to play pretend for eight or ten weeks, after which this will stop. But we are human and we forget how time works- Our entire lives are possible only because we have taught ourselves this trick of lying about time. If we thought about the truth-that every morning we wake up is a morning bringing us closer to death- we wouldn't get out of bed. So we live in this room together with a headlong intensity that approximates
"forever," because these are the moments that make us want to live at all. And so, somewhere between how much we need each other and how singularly we share a world that no one else shares, we forget that we will not always share this one impenetrable world. And because we forget, we love.
[...]
Tell me you don't understand that, and I won't believe you.
oh my god
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Suicide, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Biphobia, Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, and Sexual violence
seekittyread's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Infidelity, Mental illness, Violence, and Alcohol
Moderate: Biphobia, Drug use, Emotional abuse, and Gaslighting
Minor: Addiction, Body shaming, Bullying, Drug abuse, Homophobia, Incest, Pedophilia, Rape, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Blood, Toxic friendship, and Injury/Injury detail
sealbrecht's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Biphobia, Homophobia, Infidelity, Rape, and Blood
Minor: Drug abuse, Eating disorder, Incest, Pedophilia, and Suicide
horizonous's review against another edition
Moderate: Domestic abuse, Infidelity, Sexual content, and Violence
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Drug abuse, and Blood
joensign's review against another edition
- 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? Yes
4.5
Graphic: Sexual assault and Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Eating disorder, and Incest
caseythereader's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
📚 This book is like PLAIN BAD HEROINES + PIZZA GIRL.
📚 I felt Cass on a few levels - trying to make art work, trying to find yourself by dropping out of your life, being an elder millennial trying to understand the universe young queer people live in - whewwww!
📚 Everybody is such a mess, but in a way that feels true to life. I've known (and sometimes been) these women trying to figure out where they belong and how to exist.
📚 There is a painful two-pronged critique of the art world: one thread about how tastemakers jump on what they think is new and cutting edge but it's really the same stuff repackaged in a more soul-crushing way, and another thread about how people in power will put that pain on display and mine it for profit, even when the creator is visibly suffering.
📚 There's also some really good stuff about tokenism and molding people to fit the story in your mind. I do want to point out what at first seems like some nasty asexual rep, but I do think it's pushed back on as much as possible in the moment (and it feeds back into my previous point about people in distress not getting the support they need).
Graphic: Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Biphobia, Cursing, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Toxic relationship, and Vomit
Moderate: Ableism, Biphobia, and Homophobia
liteartha's review against another edition
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
some things that i loved:
- the writing! there's something about silverman's prose that truly elevated this to the next level for me. there's humour and emotion and a truly gripping style of writing that kept me engaged throughout
- the characters are messy, messy, messy, and so human for all their ridiculousness. many of them were insufferable, and yet i loved that. though this novel serves as a very close examination of cass herself and we don't get nearly as much development from the side characters, it remained clear throughout just how multi-layered the people surrounding her all were. we really don't get a lot of resolutions, which was refreshing
- the exploration and satirization of both the theatre and film scenes, which was funny and (delightfully) grating in near equal measure
- cass' story in relation to her age. she's 33 and she's struggling. she fumbles over and over again. she hasn't got much at all figured out
- the authentic queerness of it all and specifically the bisexual representation. this isn't a love story or a story about cass' queerness, but it's there all throughout in the way that queerness simply is a part of queer folks' lives. that's something i've struggled to find in other works and it stood out to me here for the sheer ease of it
at its core, this book meditates on success and failure, devotion to one's craft, humanity, and ambition. there's ample exploration of desire, art, queer existence, and the mess of life. the third act in particular brings a marked shift in the novel's tone and really brought things home for me. as a queer woman in the creative scene, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and what success means to me, i needed this novel, and i feel like so many others do as well.
i do want to address a few things i liked less, though, specifically in terms of representation. it's tricky in a book like this to determine what's intended as commentary or human flaws vs intentional statements, but i want to give a heads up about some of the content all the same:
- the film we spend much of the book following the production of features two token bipoc and one token gay character. this is all depicted in a very self aware and intentional manner and the token gay film character is balanced against the novel's cast of several queer characters, but given the overall whiteness of the novel's cast, the bipoc tokenism is still a bit rough to read
tw:
thank you to random house and netgalley for providing this e-arc
Graphic: Violence and Blood
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Biphobia, Homophobia, Infidelity, and Rape
Minor: Drug abuse, Eating disorder, Incest, Pedophilia, Rape, and Suicide