Scan barcode
amberly1997's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-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
2.0
Started and finished date - 29.09.24 to 30.09.24.
My rating - Two stars.
This book was okay but didn't love it, Both the atmosphere and world building was pretty good also this book was well writing. The paced of plot felt too slow for my liking and the ending of the book was okay also the cover of book was fine. The characters was fine but I feel like they needed to be flash out bit more.
My rating - Two stars.
This book was okay but didn't love it, Both the atmosphere and world building was pretty good also this book was well writing. The paced of plot felt too slow for my liking and the ending of the book was okay also the cover of book was fine. The characters was fine but I feel like they needed to be flash out bit more.
vvolof's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
bradslil's review against another edition
2.0
Very interesting story, but one I’d want to talk about in an English lit class not read for enjoyment
bwood95's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.
Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader flows on the glimmering prose across swirling imagery of desolate landscapes beset by an impending apocalypse, as the narrator continuously pursues a woman known only as ‘the girl’ while struggling to anchor himself to the elusive, ever-deteriorating reality. Through spiraling hallucinations and indefinite descriptions, reality becomes nothing but a translucent veil giving shape to the real violent and grim truths that exist only in abstraction. The blurring of reality and unreality that occurs gives these sinister abstractions a staging ground to take form within in order to explore the otherwise unspeakable darkness that leads people to make victims of one another.
Nothing in Ice is ever certain or concrete. Characters are not given names and reality is only tasted in fleeting moments, ‘but only as on might recall and incident from a dream.’ Told through the tormented mind of a narrator who—within the first 10 pages—openly admits to suffering from daytime hallucinations, the reader is forced to be led by the hand through this menacing novel by someone they cannot fully trust. Poe’s [b:The Cask of Amontillado|261240|The Cask of Amontillado|Edgar Allan Poe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327936575l/261240._SX50_.jpg|1405544] and his use of the unreliable narrator immediately come to mind through this narrators vague descriptions and elusive explanations to his afflictions, much like the intentionally unspecified ‘thousand injuries’ in Poe. There is, for instance his explanation of the girl: ‘Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings…. It made no difference, in any case she could not escape.’ ¹ Despite being alluded that it was a cruel, obdurate mother that inflicted such psychological injury, there is nothing to ground this to reality and justify his claims. We have only his observations of the girl, much of which may be distorted and our own impression is further distorted as we observe her already believing it to be true and using our glimpses to justify our pre-disposed conclusion instead of constructing our own. The same goes for the slowly creeping apocalypse, a wall of ice ‘marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path’, the consequence of constant world wars which lead to this new ice age. However, the science behind the ice is only vaguely surmised, more as if playing at a guess, and the reader is occasionally reminded that ‘no reliable source of information existed’. Kavan uses repetition to its glorious, full potential, constantly reminding us of the vague premises to reinforce their believability and tricking us to perceive something formless as concrete.
The elusive nature of the novel serves a secondary purpose beyond misdirection, as it allows the reader to experience the story and settings exactly as the narrator sees and comprehends them. The landscapes and the narrative are co-dependent metaphors of one another.
Brick by brick, Kavan builds only one certainty in this novel – the destructive powers of man. ‘An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.. Each scene and setting is beleaguered by references to wars past and present, ‘everywhere the ubiquitous ruins, decayed fortifications, evidences of a warlike bloodthirsty past’, and the encroaching ice and it is always at the forefront of the mind that the world is in a perpetual state of violence. This violence is said to be the cause of the icy apocalypse, a world collapsing both figuratively and literally due to mans ‘collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction’. Even the response to destruction is more destruction as wars rage on in increasing intensity to match coming end. ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe,’ we are told, the narrator not missing out on the obvious ironies. He looks at the actions of those around him with disgust and dismay, saddened when encountering a violent brute of a man as being ‘the kind of man who was wanted now’ and placing himself in league with a civilized, admirable man that is brutally murdered for no reason saying he ‘was my sort of man, we were not like that rabble’ to distance himself from the bleak violence. Yet, he knows he cannot escape it and is constantly drawn towards the fighting, joining the army for a time believing he ‘was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on’. The narrator’s method of misdirection leads one to wonder where his loyalty and morality really lies*.
The war-torn, doomed world is a mere backdrop for the evils that play out within arms reach of the narrator as he embarks on his crusade for the girl. ‘I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being,’ he admits, ‘Everything else in the world seemed immaterial’. The real heart of this novel is the relationship with the girl, and the narrator freely declares the world around him as questionable, as a mere veil of reality where he must conduct his search. While the universal message of destruction and more powerful groups such as the warring armies victimizing one another is chilling, Kavan directs us to the more poignant and disturbing victimization one person can inflict upon another, especially one they love. The interplay between the male characters of the husband, the warden, the narrator and their experiences with the girl show an alarming portrait of obsessive, sadistic possession. The girl ceases to be considered an equal human and becomes nothing more than chattel.
Anna Kavan was known for these startling perspectives on humanity. Her own life is a fascinating story. Born Helen Woods in what was assumed to be Cannes in 1901, she changed her name to Anna Kavan while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown following the end of her second marriage. The name Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel [b:Let Me Alone|503125|Let Me Alone|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344685079l/503125._SX50_.jpg|491186], brought with it a new personality and writing style. Beyond suffering from mental illness, she was a lifelong heroin addict³. She died in 1968 of heart failure not long after this novel was published, but before dying she burnt all her diaries, correspondence and other links into her private life to ensure that she would become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. This fascinating woman had an incredible knack for prose and a sharp, disturbing insight into human nature. For readers interested in further insight into Kavan herself, they will be pleased to know that many of her books contain thinly-fictionalized biographical elements. Books like [b:Asylum Piece|636226|Asylum Piece|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830466l/636226._SY75_.jpg|622510] cover her mental states and time spent in the asylum, [b:Sleep Has His House|204148|Sleep Has His House|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830469l/204148._SX50_.jpg|747686] hints at her sorrowful childhood, and her addiction to heroin and her open disgust of humanity is unapologetically broadcast in her short story collection [b:Julia and the Bazooka|7133685|Julia and the Bazooka|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492869750l/7133685._SX50_.jpg|1439453].
This novel is one of the most unique and engrossing literary events I have encountered. To give it a genre would cheapen the novel, as it both is and isn’t science fiction and horror, being a work of literature as elusive as its own narrative. The prose will surround and penetrate your heart much like the wall of ice in the novel as it builds the gorgeously surreal images to dazzle your mind. The subject matter, and the tone, is bleak and chilling, and exposes a violently disturbing vision of humanity, yet it is a book that you want to hug tightly as you race through the streets yelling to everyone that they should read it. As menacing as a nightmare, yet as soothing as a pleasant daydream, this book scratches an itch that few other books have been able to reach.
4.5/5
‘I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.’
¹ The girl, ‘forced since childhood into a victim’s patter of thought and behavior’, is here further victimized by her lack of name. Although ‘woman’ would be a more age-appropriate term for her, the usage of ‘girl’ is delivered with an extremely negative connotation that implies her as weak, a fragile and innocent ‘glass girl’ with no will of her own. Her physical appearance, pale and frail, is also used to highlight her weak and innocent nature, making the narrators own personal ‘indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer’ all the more sadistic despite his own assertion that ‘I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances’. It would appear the narrator is trying to be upfront (this admission coming right at the beginning of the novel) to gloss over his sadism, but reflection on his word choices reveals the residue of the disturbing truths he is attempting to misdirect the reader from.
²
³ [a:Christopher Priest|23419|Christopher Priest|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1299874167p2/23419.jpg]’s introduction discussed that many critics have unsuccessfully attempted to view the ice as a metaphor for Anna Kavan’s own heroin addiction. This overly self-conscious footnote serves more as an excuse for awkwardly placing the biographical information at the end of the review. The novel is best served by being examined on its own, as the details of the authors life are so engrossing that they easily lead towards the disservice of the Intentional Fallacy, as Priest discusses with the heroin-as-ice metaphor. That said, other novels of hers, particularly [b:Asylum Piece|636226|Asylum Piece|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830466l/636226._SY75_.jpg|622510] or [b:Sleep Has His House|204148|Sleep Has His House|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830469l/204148._SX50_.jpg|747686], have been interpreted as being highly-autobiographical. The ice, like much of the symbolism, seems to be reflective of many different ideas, but a corner stone to it's meaning may be
Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader flows on the glimmering prose across swirling imagery of desolate landscapes beset by an impending apocalypse, as the narrator continuously pursues a woman known only as ‘the girl’ while struggling to anchor himself to the elusive, ever-deteriorating reality. Through spiraling hallucinations and indefinite descriptions, reality becomes nothing but a translucent veil giving shape to the real violent and grim truths that exist only in abstraction. The blurring of reality and unreality that occurs gives these sinister abstractions a staging ground to take form within in order to explore the otherwise unspeakable darkness that leads people to make victims of one another.
Nothing in Ice is ever certain or concrete. Characters are not given names and reality is only tasted in fleeting moments, ‘but only as on might recall and incident from a dream.’ Told through the tormented mind of a narrator who—within the first 10 pages—openly admits to suffering from daytime hallucinations, the reader is forced to be led by the hand through this menacing novel by someone they cannot fully trust. Poe’s [b:The Cask of Amontillado|261240|The Cask of Amontillado|Edgar Allan Poe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327936575l/261240._SX50_.jpg|1405544] and his use of the unreliable narrator immediately come to mind through this narrators vague descriptions and elusive explanations to his afflictions, much like the intentionally unspecified ‘thousand injuries’ in Poe. There is, for instance his explanation of the girl: ‘Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings…. It made no difference, in any case she could not escape.’ ¹ Despite being alluded that it was a cruel, obdurate mother that inflicted such psychological injury, there is nothing to ground this to reality and justify his claims. We have only his observations of the girl, much of which may be distorted and our own impression is further distorted as we observe her already believing it to be true and using our glimpses to justify our pre-disposed conclusion instead of constructing our own. The same goes for the slowly creeping apocalypse, a wall of ice ‘marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path’, the consequence of constant world wars which lead to this new ice age. However, the science behind the ice is only vaguely surmised, more as if playing at a guess, and the reader is occasionally reminded that ‘no reliable source of information existed’. Kavan uses repetition to its glorious, full potential, constantly reminding us of the vague premises to reinforce their believability and tricking us to perceive something formless as concrete.
The elusive nature of the novel serves a secondary purpose beyond misdirection, as it allows the reader to experience the story and settings exactly as the narrator sees and comprehends them. The landscapes and the narrative are co-dependent metaphors of one another.
’There were many small islands, some of which floated up and became clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it. The town appeared to consist of ruins, collapsing on one another in shapeless disorder, a town of sandcastles, wrecked by the tide’The narrators own fractured mind controls our sense of time and reality, and often, and without warning, we are sent into some unreality, some brief fantasy and then dropped back into the plot as if nothing had occurred. ‘The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next,’ our narrator reflects, ‘I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping was confusing’. As the novel progresses the seamless hallucination sequences aren’t as obvious, and the novel suddenly drives forward at break-neck pace taking us through spy-dramas, courtroom scenes, war-stories and other edge-of-your-seat escape stories that we must ingest whole and wonder where the fantasy and reality may have blurred. Tiny hints of obvious unreality present themselves occasionally, such as producing a ‘foreign automatic weapon’ when one wasn’t present earlier, however, the all we can truly do is hold on tight and enjoy the thrill-ride. Time itself is subject to the narrators own distorted mind, as events are mentioned that he once observed that could not have occurred within the boundaries of time presented in the scenes, and the positioning of the opening scenes is a bit cumbersome to place along the timeline. The narrative almost feels cyclical at times. There are many different methods of addressing these incongruities depending on how the reader interprets the novel, yet it would appear that nothing in the book aims towards one certain conclusion or meaning. Instead, Kavan seems to write to give a wide interpretability because the real issues at play are very abstract and intangible, and it appears she would prefer to keep them that way in order to allot them their full force. Ultimately, depriving the reader of lucidness and conclusiveness brings the uncomfortable, uncertain tone of the novel to life. The surrealist qualities are elevated to near maddening proportions by taking any safe-guards away from the reader and forcing them to grasp desperately at the intangibles.
Brick by brick, Kavan builds only one certainty in this novel – the destructive powers of man. ‘An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.. Each scene and setting is beleaguered by references to wars past and present, ‘everywhere the ubiquitous ruins, decayed fortifications, evidences of a warlike bloodthirsty past’, and the encroaching ice and it is always at the forefront of the mind that the world is in a perpetual state of violence. This violence is said to be the cause of the icy apocalypse, a world collapsing both figuratively and literally due to mans ‘collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction’. Even the response to destruction is more destruction as wars rage on in increasing intensity to match coming end. ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe,’ we are told, the narrator not missing out on the obvious ironies. He looks at the actions of those around him with disgust and dismay, saddened when encountering a violent brute of a man as being ‘the kind of man who was wanted now’ and placing himself in league with a civilized, admirable man that is brutally murdered for no reason saying he ‘was my sort of man, we were not like that rabble’ to distance himself from the bleak violence. Yet, he knows he cannot escape it and is constantly drawn towards the fighting, joining the army for a time believing he ‘was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on’. The narrator’s method of misdirection leads one to wonder where his loyalty and morality really lies*.
The war-torn, doomed world is a mere backdrop for the evils that play out within arms reach of the narrator as he embarks on his crusade for the girl. ‘I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being,’ he admits, ‘Everything else in the world seemed immaterial’. The real heart of this novel is the relationship with the girl, and the narrator freely declares the world around him as questionable, as a mere veil of reality where he must conduct his search. While the universal message of destruction and more powerful groups such as the warring armies victimizing one another is chilling, Kavan directs us to the more poignant and disturbing victimization one person can inflict upon another, especially one they love. The interplay between the male characters of the husband, the warden, the narrator and their experiences with the girl show an alarming portrait of obsessive, sadistic possession. The girl ceases to be considered an equal human and becomes nothing more than chattel.
‘It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing her only function might have been to link us together.’These malignant pleasures of victimization are at the core of each scene, real or unreal, and illustrated through the vibrant imagery of each stark landscape which Kavan paints with her words. ‘All of this was happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.’ The surreal plotline becomes a place for her abstract ideas to flicker in and out of physical form but their malevolent nature is too poisonous to exist in glaring reality so reality must fold up and falter in order for them to truly rear their ugly heads. Hallucinations occur so we can look them in the face and make sense out of non-sense, horrific ideas are structured in a way to make them tangible enough to process. The narrator himself cannot even fathom his own depravity, and suffers from unrealities, or projects them onto others because he cannot face the blinding truth². Kavan presents a humanity that deserves the destruction that it receives, and this is the most horrific aspect of the novel. It makes one wonder if they are blind to their own moral deformities, conditioned to accept them as normal because we are so able to rationalize and gloss over the troubling aspects of ourselves. One must question if they are actually some damnable beast writhing in their own bile yet thinking it smells of roses and projecting onto society and those around them their own personal iniquity. What else is truly alarming is the way the victims become conditioned to accept these monstrosities, playing right into the degredation and violence. Kavan seems to admonish this behavior, creating a borderless world of victimization that damns both parties.
’In the delirium of the dance, it was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims. Anyway, distinction no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all dancers spun on the edge of nothingness.’It isn’t so much an attack on the victim, as it is an attack on the ways it is so easy to succumb to behavior that can make oneself into a villain.
Anna Kavan was known for these startling perspectives on humanity. Her own life is a fascinating story. Born Helen Woods in what was assumed to be Cannes in 1901, she changed her name to Anna Kavan while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown following the end of her second marriage. The name Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel [b:Let Me Alone|503125|Let Me Alone|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344685079l/503125._SX50_.jpg|491186], brought with it a new personality and writing style. Beyond suffering from mental illness, she was a lifelong heroin addict³. She died in 1968 of heart failure not long after this novel was published, but before dying she burnt all her diaries, correspondence and other links into her private life to ensure that she would become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. This fascinating woman had an incredible knack for prose and a sharp, disturbing insight into human nature. For readers interested in further insight into Kavan herself, they will be pleased to know that many of her books contain thinly-fictionalized biographical elements. Books like [b:Asylum Piece|636226|Asylum Piece|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830466l/636226._SY75_.jpg|622510] cover her mental states and time spent in the asylum, [b:Sleep Has His House|204148|Sleep Has His House|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830469l/204148._SX50_.jpg|747686] hints at her sorrowful childhood, and her addiction to heroin and her open disgust of humanity is unapologetically broadcast in her short story collection [b:Julia and the Bazooka|7133685|Julia and the Bazooka|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492869750l/7133685._SX50_.jpg|1439453].
This novel is one of the most unique and engrossing literary events I have encountered. To give it a genre would cheapen the novel, as it both is and isn’t science fiction and horror, being a work of literature as elusive as its own narrative. The prose will surround and penetrate your heart much like the wall of ice in the novel as it builds the gorgeously surreal images to dazzle your mind. The subject matter, and the tone, is bleak and chilling, and exposes a violently disturbing vision of humanity, yet it is a book that you want to hug tightly as you race through the streets yelling to everyone that they should read it. As menacing as a nightmare, yet as soothing as a pleasant daydream, this book scratches an itch that few other books have been able to reach.
4.5/5
‘I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.’
¹ The girl, ‘forced since childhood into a victim’s patter of thought and behavior’, is here further victimized by her lack of name. Although ‘woman’ would be a more age-appropriate term for her, the usage of ‘girl’ is delivered with an extremely negative connotation that implies her as weak, a fragile and innocent ‘glass girl’ with no will of her own. Her physical appearance, pale and frail, is also used to highlight her weak and innocent nature, making the narrators own personal ‘indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer’ all the more sadistic despite his own assertion that ‘I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances’. It would appear the narrator is trying to be upfront (this admission coming right at the beginning of the novel) to gloss over his sadism, but reflection on his word choices reveals the residue of the disturbing truths he is attempting to misdirect the reader from.
²
Spoiler
It is debatable, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the warden and the narrator are one and the same person. There are moments of half-clarity when the narrator recognizes his own denial and notices the inconsistencies in his fantasy. ‘I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion [sic]. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion about which of us was which, We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity.’ The husband may very well be the same character as well. In the introduction, [a:Christopher Priest|23419|Christopher Priest|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1299874167p2/23419.jpg] asserts that the warden and the husband are the same man, but says nothing of the narrator. The multiple interpretative quality of this book is one of its strongest aspects.³ [a:Christopher Priest|23419|Christopher Priest|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1299874167p2/23419.jpg]’s introduction discussed that many critics have unsuccessfully attempted to view the ice as a metaphor for Anna Kavan’s own heroin addiction. This overly self-conscious footnote serves more as an excuse for awkwardly placing the biographical information at the end of the review. The novel is best served by being examined on its own, as the details of the authors life are so engrossing that they easily lead towards the disservice of the Intentional Fallacy, as Priest discusses with the heroin-as-ice metaphor. That said, other novels of hers, particularly [b:Asylum Piece|636226|Asylum Piece|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830466l/636226._SY75_.jpg|622510] or [b:Sleep Has His House|204148|Sleep Has His House|Anna Kavan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830469l/204148._SX50_.jpg|747686], have been interpreted as being highly-autobiographical. The ice, like much of the symbolism, seems to be reflective of many different ideas, but a corner stone to it's meaning may be
Spoiler
the silent and white aspect of it that the narrator frequently mentions. It seems it is a fresh start, a blank, pure whiteness to cover up all the ugly and violent aspects of humanity and himself. He often speaks of how it will end all wars and engulf the earth in silence, a silence he so wishes for because his own actions are unspeakable. He is drowning in his and the worlds evils and wishes for them to be purified in their own destruction.
severelyhopefulcloud's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
fluffypotamus's review against another edition
4.0
this book was a fever dream. loved the writing style. knowing some of the author's background really gives you another level of appreciation for what's going on here.
kjn1995's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
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
3.0
bels_ak's review against another edition
3.0
Beautifully written but not narratively enjoyable. It has confusing jumps from story to random dreams without any kind of prompt which was very confusing before I worked out that was what was happening.
As usual I was permanently frustrated with horrible men not leaving women who they don't like alone.
I also desperately want the apocalypse to lean towards human connection and comradery rather than war and horror and cannibalism but also understand why when everyone is dying, shooting someone doesn't seem like a big deal.
As usual I was permanently frustrated with horrible men not leaving women who they don't like alone.
I also desperately want the apocalypse to lean towards human connection and comradery rather than war and horror and cannibalism but also understand why when everyone is dying, shooting someone doesn't seem like a big deal.