Reviews with content warning for Ableism - The Lost Village

Reviews tagging 'Ableism'

The Lost Village, by Camilla Sten

39 reviews

j_squaredd's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-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? It's complicated

3.75

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chouxlette's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.0

It has weak character development with uninteresting main characters. The side characters are more interesting even though they only show up in flashbacks. I cared about getting to know about them more then I did about the main cast. Some of whom are forgettable and one dimensional. Things happen to them, but there’s nothing attaching me to the characters that I don’t care what happened to them.

At first I was like there’s no way these characters are older than 20, but Alice says she’s 29 so I’m guessing everyone else is around that age. It’s first person perspective, but Alice talks like someone who is much younger than she actually is hence why I didn’t believe she was close to 30.

The writing style eers on the YA side and it feels like this was written as a YA novel then the author later decided to age up all the characters. There needed to be more showing of certain actions, emotions, feelings etc rather than just telling.

The plot is the most interesting aspect of the book and the only reason I kept reading. I was hooked and needed to know what happened and why. It feels like the author wrote this with the intention to get it turned into a film or tv show. Some parts of the book feel like instructions to a camera which is weird considering this is a novel and not a script.

Comparing this to Midsommar and Blair Witch Project is definitely a bold choice. The novel isn’t bad—I finished it after all. It definitely needed more character development, stronger sentences as well as description.

I wouldn’t recommend this to older readers or anyone who reads above a high school reading level.

The YA crowd would definitely eat this up as well as anyone who likes a creepy story or is just bored.

Lastly, The authors note at the beginning shouldn’t have been there. In my honest opinion, we should be able to know a book is about mental illness without being told it’s about mental illness and how women get treated due to their mental illness.

The author note forces the reader to already have that conclusion and not question the very questionable representation of mental illness. If the author really wanted it in the novel, it could have gone at the end, but setting up a novel like that almost makes me think the author had no real confidence in what was being written about.

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