Reviews tagging 'Sexual violence'

Tentacle by Rita Indiana, Achy Obejas

16 reviews

amvs1111's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious 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? Yes

3.0


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vegetablemathematics's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5


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dancevera's review against another edition

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

2.0

I did not enjoy this book, largely because I didn't like any of the characters. There were some interesting ideas in here sure, but I couldn't bring myself to care about anyone. 

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valpal77's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0


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femmenova's review against another edition

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challenging
  • Loveable characters? No
For full disclosure: I DNF-ed it at 42 pages and I only got that far into the book because I was trying to make sense of what I was reading. There's just so much exposition dump and sexual and racial violence casually mentioned for the sake of.. shock? To show how post-apocalyptic the state of the world is? The writing is dense and convoluted for the sake of introducing many different stories to understand a character more but I don't see it. The book boasts that it is genre-bending but that phrase feels like a catch-all to pretend that this book was something more than what it was which was: clunky writing, bad pacing, the awkward transition between characters that I thought it was a collection of short stories instead, and bad character studies.

Between that and finding out that the author is a whole ass non-Black person, which immediately made me reading the work uncomfortable because of the casual N-word being thrown around and how every Black supporting person in the book is hated by the main character(s). 

Listen, I have read a lot of dark literary books that does not have a single redeeming character in them. Books like The Black Cathedral are of a similar tone to this one but the writing was far more simplistic and the millions of characters that were written were developed in a Show-Not-Dump way.

Not for me at all which sucks because I was excited to read this! 

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itotiani's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious fast-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? Yes

5.0

I had rated it 4 stars on first read but one year later this book keeps haunting me and I keep realizing the more and more I think about it how brilliant it is.

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