Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

49 reviews

rei_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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kitty03's review against another edition

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challenging sad 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

3.75

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meroth07's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced

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

5.0

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808jake_'s review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

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

5.0

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uhhadrianna's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad fast-paced

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

4.25

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serendipitysbooks's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.25

Small Mercies is set in South Boston during the tumultuous years of the busing crisis, an attempt to desegregate public schools by bussing students. In those times of heightened racial tensions a young Black man is found dead on a train platform in a white area, and a young white woman who is implicated in his death disappears. There is a lot more depth to the plot that that and a surprising amount of nuance. Lehane does a couple of things particularly well in this book. The first is his depiction of Southey, the predominant white, Irish Catholic working class neighbourhood, at the centre of the novel. He highlights the good - the strong sense of community - and the bad - organised crime, drugs and racism. The latter is particularly confronting, especially the sheer number of racial slurs the characters spew out. The second is his characterisation, especially of Mary Pat, mother of missing teen Jules. She’s a scrappy tough broad and certainly personifies the expression “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” if the woman scorned is an avenging mother. But Mary Pat is also memorable for a subtler reason and that is her changing position with regards to race. At the start of the novel she is clearly as racist as her neighbours, strongly objects to the desegregation of schools, and unthinkingly accepts and repeats racial stereotypes. But over the course of the novel she begins to acknowledge the falseness of racial stereotypes, the harm caused by racism, and her role in raising a racist daughter and contributing to Jules’s actions. In times of stress, pressure or when challenged she falls back to her racist ways. Still it is really interesting to see this evolution develop.

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scarlatte16's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

bek67's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

What the hell did I just read. This book did not make me happy, it did not give me any good feels. It was a challenging read. The language was appalling. I am not a prude and I cuss, but I just inwardly cringed every time the n word was spoken-and it was A LOT! Our protagonist (Mary Pat) is a racist through and through. I think, or at least I hope right at the end of the book when she was on the phone to Bobby, she realizes how racist she has been all her life. <She is describing how when you're a kid and they feed you all the lies. Who you can't trust and how that's just the Way. And as a kid you want to be part of the Way, so you embrace it and you dig in and then spread the same lies to your kids. Bobby tells her it's ok but her response is, "It's not!" So I hope she realizes the error of her ways even though it's too late for her./> This is not an easy read, but I did give it four stars because I read it very quickly-I need to know what happened to Jules, Mary Pat and the Butler crew.

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cassiebartelme's review against another edition

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

2.75

It’s been a while since I picked up a Dennis Lehane novel and this was was fine. It has his signature style of weaving a story with a large web of characters and I appreciated the setting against the Boston desegregation busing crisis of early 1970s but I ultimately felt like it was familiar territory…The Southie projects of Boston, Irish Catholics struggling to resolve “right vs wrong”, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, violence, the manifestation of parental love…

If you like what Lehane does in writing about Boston you will most likely enjoy this one. If you are looking for something different than pick something else.

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estam1's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

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