Reviews with content warning for Blood - Meddling Kids

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Meddling Kids, by Sara Segovia Esteban, Edgar Cantero

14 reviews

wrestleacademic's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious tense fast-paced

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

3.75

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connorjdaley's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.5

My fiancé has always been huge into Scooby-Doo, so I had ordered this for her and she really liked it. This Spooky Season I decided to give it a listen instead of a read, and it was a good one.

For all intents and purposes, this is an adult Scooby-Doo reimagining. There’s some great Easter eggs, references, and alterations. But I particularly liked that the author changed the characterizations of the meddling kids. Although I did find some of it, like the romance aspect, to feel incredibly forced and weird. Still enjoyed the overall changes though.

13 years after the final case for the Blyton Summer Detective Club, Andy decides it’s time to figure out what went wrong and get the band back together. They are all messed up, and at first I just thought it was going to be a dark story about their combined ptsd, but the story really deviated in at least a somewhat satisfying way. What if they weren’t just meddling kids? What if not every crime had a guy in a mask at the end of it? That’s what this story seeks to show.

My only real gripe for this one is that the climax builds and builds and builds, and then I personally felt like it fell flat. It actually comes to a close so suddenly that I thought I missed it and re-listened to a full half an hour…I hadn’t missed it, it’s just in actuality, not really there anyway. Regardless though I did really enjoy the rest of the stuff that goes us there.

Personally a 3.5/5* for me, I wish there had been Scooby snacks…

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marykendrick666_'s review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

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

1.5

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mikc's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

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

1.5

The way it was written felt very odd and disjointed. Sometimes it was written like a play, sometimes like a tv show, and sometimes like a normal book. In addition, it changes points of view. Normally, I’m fine with this but sometimes the change happened in the middle of the chapter making difficult at times to track what exactly is going on.

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epeolatri's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

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

5.0

This has very easily become one of my new favorite novels. I loved the author’s writing style and humor. Each character was amazing and fucked up in their own way. Every time I thought I had it figured out something even crazier happened, right up until the last sentence.

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emily_journals's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

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

2.0

The concept of this book really intrigued me. Scooby-Doo with Lovecraftian elements where the monsters MIGHT BE (and likely are) real? Sign me up!

Except this book was so disappointing in execution. From reading other reviews, I'm so glad I read the audiobook version of this, because the stage direction inserts and made up words weren't as noticeable, so I'll give the narrator mad props for making those things really unnoticeable. I thought the book started off on the right track, but around the halfway point in this book is when I really started noticing all the negatives.

First off, for being set in the 90s (and flashback-esque scenes from the 70s), I personally did not feel much nostalgia around any certain time period. This book really could have mostly been grabbed out of the 90s and plopped into modern day with very little change, which is 100% fine, EXCEPT this book promises to be nostalgic (which I personally did not find it to be).

Secondly, the ending of this book was an absolute mess. Everything that happened in the last ~20% of the book was so chaotic and unbelievable and hard to follow.

Spoiler

People were dying and being resurrected left and right, dogs were getting possessed by demons/angels/random protector beings(?), rituals were being cast, people were living forever; it was all just TOO MUCH going on.

Seriously, so much of the end of this book was just fight scene after fight scene, with little substantial buffer between, which I personally find really boring to read (or listen to) for a significant amount of time, especially when every fight scene is "gang fights creatures, then run, then fight new hoard of same creatures, then run.... repeat".

Lastly, this book has some pretty awful and dangerous discussion and representation of mental health, trans people, and queer people. The mental health discussion in this book is unnuanced and the whole introduction scene to the asylum has some very problematic descriptions of people with and without mental health issues. The main villain ended up using transness as a device to live forever and be evil, which was super unnecessary and could have been entirely avoided and is a very pointed decision from the author. The lesbian character in this book is also very much a caricature of a "typical lesbian" media portrayal, and the sapphic relationship seemed like something that a man would write as a fantasy of a sapphic relationship.

Overall, I wish I had done more research into this book before picking it up instead of taking the promises given by the author/publisher at face value, and beyond that, I wish I had given up on this book sooner.

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courtneyfalling's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.5

Oh boy! This book! Okay. So I listened to the first ~half on audiobook while driving, and it made the slowed down, reflective road trip scenes really resonate. I'm fascinated with how this book reimagined the Scooby Doo gang and used that premise to explore deeper issues of trauma, memory, economic depression and town-level politics, and supernatural horror while still having genuine relationships and banter between the characters. (There's some really good one-liners and similes strewn in.) But even while listening... I felt like a lot of my final take on this book would depend on how it concluded its main mystery. Early on, we get somewhat intrusive comments about Andy's butch lesbian aesthetic, speculating that she may be a young trans man, and these comments sit very differently with this book's actual end than if they had set up a larger exploration of gender and identity for Andy (which I'll get to unpacking more). There's also one really nasty scene early on where (cw: sexual assault)

Spoiler

Carrie dreams that Andy is sexually assaulting her while they're sleeping in Carrie's apartment together, then wakes to realize it was a horrid nightmare. I was thinking of my one friend's argument that vivid sexual assault scenes are never necessary in books, and this really swayed me toward that side. It had no real bearing on the plot and it was awful and jarring

.

Then... Nate. Look. This book doesn't sugarcoat that psychiatric institutions are just incarceration, but rather than just letting that critique exist as part of the book, the author keeps going out of his way to have the characters make saneist and ableist jokes about Nate and the folks he knew in psychiatric institutions. It's like the critique becomes that these places are prisons because of the foul and disruptive strangeness of the people inside... rather than actually thinking about trauma and social factors like the narrative easily could've done!

Now for that frickin' ending.

Spoiler

Other reviewers have also noted this, but to center this book around a *gasp* evil trans woman reveal and use that to contrast the characters' own trauma arcs, especially to contrast Andy as a butch lesbian who's been speculatively labeled trans the entire book, is transphobic and shitty as hell. And even the lesbian representation is sketchy at best. Andy comes off as creepy, exploitative, and harassing toward Carrie, and it makes no sense for them to end up even loosely in the romantic relationship that's alluded to. Also, why did the last page pack in such a weird character reveal for Tim? Not only was it wildly out of left field, like a bad attempt to last minute deal with what the author realized was a slight plot hole, it was also, you guessed it, bad representation, this time of Indigenous folks and folklore in the Pacific Northwest! This book definitely buys into appropriating and misusing Indigenous folklore for its own benefit. Ugh. I wish this book didn’t have so many issues... the concept is genuinely cool then it just took every opportunity possible to fuck it up.

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laurajones's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes

4.25

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hotbitchbookclub's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious fast-paced

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

2.5

i know people either loved or hated the writing style of this one and i think i'm somewhere in the middle. it was fun!! and i found it engaging. my brand of adhd was never bored because it kept switching it up throughout the paragraph, so i enjoyed it a lot. the plot was also FUN and not at all what i expected when i picked this book up. i'm a huge scooby-doo fan so the characters alone were enough to get me to give it a try and i guess i totally forgot about the summary mentioning Lovecraftian horror bc i was like WHAT!! when we started getting into it.
i liked the idea of andy and kerri and thought how they ultimately end up was sweet. however i'd be lying if i said some of their dialogue/interactions didn't make me cringe- like them more than once being like "Ha ha VULVAS omg babe stoppp ur so funny" and stuff idk it was extremely weird at times. also the discussion and comments surrounding transgender characters and gender affirming surgery.....like dude what was that all about. felt very waka_flaka_ok meme

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kaylatee's review against another edition

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adventurous dark 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

1.0

Only worth checking out if you're a die-hard Scooby-Doo fan, and even so, you may still be offended.

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