Reviews with content warning for Violence - Take It Back

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

ansm10's review

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dark emotional fast-paced

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

3.75

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harthara13's review

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dark sad medium-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? Yes

3.5

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zenzi2read's review

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challenging emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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carissa230's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

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

4.5

Zara is a victim's advocate. She has recently gotten the case of Jodie a 16-year old rape victim. This is a particularly tricky case for Zara.

Problem 1 The defendants are handsome, well-connected, teenagers. They're also Muslim and a part of the community that her family is a part of.

Problem 2 the victim isn't the typical beautiful or even average-looking female. She has facial deformities and physical deformities that make people less likely to believe her to be the victim of this type of crime.

It doesn't help that Jodie keeps slightly changing the facts and hiding things that she feels "make her look bad". Zara believes her and is willing to take the anger of her family and community to see justice served.

This is a hard read. Zara is going through a lot herself. There are expectations placed on the females in the Muslim religion that she feels she doesn't want to live up to. Her family treats her extremely poorly.

Jodie is living with physical flaws that would make anyone's life more difficult. Her mother treats her like a pariah. Like her simple birth made her mother's life go completely wrong.

The teenage boys are being led by a rich boy who probably doesn't have anything to worry about in life. They can't leave his friend circle or face problems of their own. Yet the others in the group aren't from rich families and their lives will be harder. Sometimes following the wrong person can make you life more difficult than you would have ever thought.

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megelizabeth's review against another edition

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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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