Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

Penance by Eliza Clark

154 reviews

bella_cavicchi's review against another edition

dark sad tense fast-paced

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

4.0

What a twisty and chilling ride. I struggle with the level of violent detail in both this and BOYS PARTS—it feels gratuitous, are we readers not any different than the people Clark critiques?, etc., etc.—but I suppose my conflicting feelings are the very point. The dynamics of teenage girls can be a world unto themselves.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Child death, Death, Gun violence, Infidelity, Mental illness, Torture, Violence, Grief, Murder, Lesbophobia, Fire/Fire injury, Toxic friendship, and Classism

Moderate: Child abuse, Cursing, Drug use, Rape, Sexual assault, Death of parent, Abandonment, and Alcohol

Minor: Suicide

geraldine's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

3.5

picked this up because i read boy parts and liked the writing style well enough that i figured i would give her next book a go. and i liked her writing style here as well! i also liked this one better, for the record, even though it's a lot more complex. i do feel like i wanted to keep a little notebook with everyone's name and a basic summary because a few times i felt like i had forgotten who someone was, but this might just be a me problem. and by the end this was not an issue.

all other takes are spoilers from here-on out.

i hadn't remembered the synopsis when i checked out the library ebook, but the very beginning was promising to me, like the setup of the second release of a (fictional) true crime non-fiction book, i do like a commentary on true crime. and then imagine my surprise when i realized that it was not only this but specifically a commentary on serial killer fandom and RPF???????????????

i actually have a note in the kindle app on my phone (i read this on both physical kindle and phone app, for the record) from around the 57% mark when i realized she was drawing a direct parallel between what dolly was doing with her serial killer fanfiction and what alec was doing with his book. and for the record, i did think it worked.

my main complaint about this is the very end, that maybe she felt like she was being too subtle here? (she was not.) and then has that final interviewer sit down with alec and y'know... literally say out loud the thesis of the book. i feel like this was genuinely unnecessary! i don't think we needed that interview at all! i felt like the afterward up until that point, info from the editor explaining who was suing and why and who had complained etc, this was enough to get the point across. trust your readers to pick up on this even if you don't explicitly spell it out!

this also made me question one of the other things i thought i was picking up, like if she directly explained one of the things she was hinting at, does that mean that i was just reading into the other element i thought she was suggesting? or did she choose to leave that subtle and it was intended? because to me it also felt like alec was not only being voyeuristic and obsessing over the culprits here, but also that he is doing this to teenage girls, and there may be more to it than just this. he is a fifty year old man, obsessing about teenage girls. 

he includes what heather says about dolly's father and the accusations that dolly refuted on the stand, and in his fanfiction moments he has other characters allude to the accusations being true, but then when heather explains what she saw, he defends dolly's father and directly compares himself to the father. with an example where he spends hours standing watching his daughter sleep. really wondered about this one for a while. perhaps i really am reading too much into it, but still.

that's all really. i thought she did a good job integrating like... i guess online and "fandom" concepts in a way that made sense for the story she was trying to tell. and not assuming that a random reader in a barnes & noble would automatically know what the term RPF meant.

anyway, vriska homestuck gets namedropped in this.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Emotional abuse, and Fire/Fire injury

Moderate: Child death, Death, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Mass/school shootings, Murder, and Toxic friendship

Minor: Drug use, Incest, Pedophilia, Sexual assault, and Alcohol

tctimlin's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

4.0

I may have to sit with this book for a while.  The Irish bookseller in Foyles in London convinced my friend and I to buy this book.  I started it on the plane, then put it down for a while.  At points, I was feeling less than enthusiastic about the story - but I realized at the end that I had been missing the point.  Written as a “true crime” deep dive into the torture and murder of a teenage girl by three of her classmates (also girls), this journalist narrator presents his story using podcasts, social media posts, interviews with friends and family of the victim and the perpetrators.  He claims to be writing the “definitive” account of the murder -the one that will explain the why behind this horrific crime.  But is that really what he’s doing?  And who is true crime written for?  Who does it benefit?  Whose appetites does it satiate?  An exploration into society’s fascination with crime, especially the most unimaginable crimes.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Death, Emotional abuse, Murder, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Body shaming, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Suicide, Mass/school shootings, Alcohol, and Injury/Injury detail

pixylprincess's review against another edition

4.25

I really enjoyed this book. I always think about the ethical and moral dilemmas involving my own personal interest in true crime, and I love how this book approaches this topic. 

As someone who consumes true crime media regularly, Clark really captured the true crime world perfectly. Annoying podcasters, dramatizing the facts to make them “more entertaining”, profiting from families who have suffered from the crime, and theorizing and connecting your own dots about other people’s lives whom you know nothing about. People who think “I could’ve saved them” and fantasize about serial killers. It’s all in this book.

The writing was gripping and the girls felt relatable, especially if you also lived through and experienced the tumblr era. I enjoyed the background of all of the relationships and seeing how exactly it got to such an escalated point. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Homophobia, Mental illness, Misogyny, Self harm, Sexism, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Murder, and Toxic friendship

prsmablydeadarm's review against another edition

dark funny reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

fantastic and brutal

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Death, Violence, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Bullying, Pedophilia, Rape, Suicide, and Toxic friendship

near the beginning there’s really tough to read descriptions of the central crime of the story. a daughter’s suicide is part of a character’s backstory. one of the main characters was molested as a child, and another character’s father was friends with a famous dead pedophile.

alexandra__rae's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Mass/school shootings, Murder, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Bullying, Lesbophobia, Fire/Fire injury, and Alcohol

jmcampbell57's review against another edition

dark reflective slow-paced

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

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Murder, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Alcoholism, Drug use, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Mass/school shootings, and Fire/Fire injury

Minor: Suicidal thoughts

coffeecass's review against another edition

challenging dark tense medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Toxic relationship, Violence, Mass/school shootings, Murder, Lesbophobia, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Body horror, Death, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Kidnapping, and Fire/Fire injury

semjl's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

I really enjoyed this book. As someone who was a big tumblr user in my teens (although not in the way these girls use it) I found it quite nostalgic. Also the complex relationships of teenage girls with a mixture of nice upbringings and loving homes vs without.

Felt a bit confused at the end.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Body shaming, Bullying, Death, Gun violence, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Mass/school shootings, Murder, Toxic friendship, Alcohol, and Pandemic/Epidemic

dna_books's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

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

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Sexual assault, Suicide, Violence, Murder, and Toxic friendship