Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Outside

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

The Outside by Ada Hoffmann

6 reviews

avilareads's review against another edition

adventurous mysterious 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

3.75

an epic cosmic horror novel with complex gods, a strong autistic main character, and some great philosophical questions brought up in the mix. enjoyable ride!
if i read the next book it will be because i’m fascinated by the fucked up, love-hate, complicated relationship dynamic between elu and akavi.

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious 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

4.0

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goofymango's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

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

2.75

I feel really bad giving this book a low star rating, because it wasn't bad. Hoffman isn't a bad author by any stretch of the imagination. I think this is one of those marmite books; you either love it, or it doesn't quite hit the mark for you. I liked the ideas of the book, and the characters were refreshing (hello multiple neurodiverse characters). I think the problem for me was that this book is long, long to the point where I kept getting so, so lost, and the plot felt very drawn out and by the time anything actually really got going/happened, all the potential emotional impact and effect of it was really diluted. I think if this book had been half the length, I would have really loved it, but by the end I was only sticking with it because I didn't want to stop after investing so much time. It was anticlimactic at the end, and I'm still not really sure what happened.

Again, it's NOT because of bad/poor writing, or weak characters etc; I just didn't mesh well with this book. Reading the other reviews, I think I'm in the minority on the front, and I'm really glad others seemed to like it so much. I really loved the approach to neurodiverse characters!

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readingelli's review

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challenging tense medium-paced

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

4.5

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wardenred's review

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dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective tense medium-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? Yes

5.0

To fight a lie, you didn’t have to use guns. Just the truth.

Wow. This was an amazing wild ride, and I'm so happy to learn there's a sequel—I need to get it ASAP, because while the story doesn't feel unfinished, there's a definite set-up for powerful things to come.

The characters here are simply brilliant. All the humans are wonderfully human. All the angels... well, let's say I loved to hate every single one of them, for different reasons. My favorite part, though, was the worldbuilding. The book is as lovecraftian as the cover promises, and all the eldritch horrors are as beautifully weird and terrifying as they should be. However, they're far from the most terrifying thing in this book. Compared to what some of the characters get up to while combating them, the eldritch horrors are downright comforting, and that's probably the most impactful part of the story for me. I'll refrain from elaborating on it, because that would mean sharing way too many spoilers. I'll just go back to talking about the setting. The entire thing with humanity creating its own gods by experimenting with AI and then making their continued existence and nearly unlimited power possible by simply agreeing with it? There's so much here that resonates deeply with my currently frequent thoughts of power structures and shared responsibility and how blurry the lines get sometimes between victims and accomplices—perhaps even victims, accomplices, and culprits. I also find it so important that in this world of gods and monsters, it's the most human choices that make the biggest difference.

The book was structured neatly, too, with epigraphs from in-universe books, journals, and documents before each chapter embedding some important details with little explanations first, and then the narrative itself picked up those threads and spun them into a wider picture. The genre-appropriate tension held up nicely throughout the whole story, although I'll admit there were a few hiccups near the middle, pacing-wise. I also suspect that some parts of the setting and plot may have gone over my head a bit because I'm very much not an expert on quantum physics. However, none of that retracted from the enjoyment I got from this novel. I guess my overall rating for it lies somewhere between 4.75 and 5 stars. I'll round it up.

Oh, and I finish with the obligatory mention of this being a totally queernorm world, which I'm always here for. I also enjoyed the representation of neurodiversity and following a queer autistic heroine whose arc isn't about being queer or autistic, although those parts of her character definitely inform a lot of her journey.

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sarah984's review

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dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.0

I really enjoyed this book. The characters live in a world of AI gods and their agents, cybernetically enhanced human "angels". The main character is a physicist who is thrown into a world of plots, counterplots and Lovecraftian horrors after an energy source she creates destroys a space station. Rather than being immediately executed as a heretic, she is pressed into service to locate her mentor, the source of the equations that led to the disaster.

I wouldn't call most of the characters "likable" per se, but they were interesting and dynamic. (Though unfortunately I found the love interest kind of bland) The horrors that Yasira comes into contact with are described in an engaging way and it’s interesting to see her thought process changing over time.

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