Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

Take It Back by Kia Abdullah

3 reviews

megelizabeth's review against another edition

dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

4.0

This book is pretty much pure pain. It's not one to go into lightly, and it has a lot of content warnings, which I would recommend checking even more so than usual. It's definitely one that's going to stay on my mind.

It's also extremely well-written and tightly-plotted, with a jaw-dropping ending that will continue to haunt me. There's lots of great commentary on many issues, with it never feeling like there are too many topics raised and not enough attention given to each. It took me a while to warm to our protagonist, Zara, but I did come to appreciate her growth, and I absolutely adored her friendship with Safran and, for me, this friendship also plays a really important role thematically in the story.

The main thing I didn't love about this book is more of a me problem than a book problem, as I think it's fairly typical of legal/courtroom thrillers and is one of the reasons I don't read too many of them; it's that there's a big break in time between the beginning of the book and the court scenes, and it felt, to me, as if there was undoubtedly lots we were missing out on. That was probably entirely intentional, and as I've already said, typical of the genre, but it's just something that doesn't tend to work too well for me personally. The only other thing I didn't like and which threw me out of the story a bit was that there's a really odd conversation justifying physical abuse of children, which was so out-of-keeping with the book as a whole which had some really great conversations around abuse, trauma, and difficult familial relationships; it just didn't make sense to me at all why this throwaway conversation should be included.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Murder, Child death, Drug abuse, Racism, Ableism, Violence, Bullying, Rape, Child abuse, Racial slurs, and Death

Moderate: Classism, Animal death, Alcoholism, and Death of parent

mikki_9's review

challenging emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Bullying, Drug abuse, Grief, Hate crime, Islamophobia, Misogyny, Murder, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Toxic friendship, Violence, and Xenophobia

Moderate: Addiction, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Cursing, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, and Emotional abuse

roxiw's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Overall enjoyable, but the tone was kind of pro-cop at times and I wasn't a fan of how graphic some of the descriptions of underage sex were.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Sexual assault, Addiction, Ableism, and Sexual content

Moderate: Xenophobia, Racism, Child abuse, and Alcoholism

The descriptions of the rape are very graphic due to the fact that the details are recounted to the authorities and in court. Sexual content between children as young as 14 is also described.