Reviews tagging 'Fatphobia'

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

14 reviews

ribbitingreads's review against another edition

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3.0

 This book has so many trigger warnings:
cheating, struggling w/ conceiving children, suicide, rape, fatshaming/fatphobia, death of a child, death of a baby, cancer, death by drowning, sexual assault, etc.
and left me so frustrated at times, however, I truly loved how raw and conflicted Elle was for majority of the story. We are taken on a journey between the most two important men in her life, her husband and her best friend. We learn how they meet and why each man might be (or not) a right match for her. She is a definitely messy character, but I think part of the charm of this book is the everyone can relate to being at a crossroad of choosing what makes you comfortable or what makes you feel alive. The book has an opening ending (though you can probably infer what her choose was by the end of the book).
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beastmomma38's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This book is not exactly as described. Yes, it's about a woman struggling with her past and what to do about her infidelity with her first love. What I wish I would have known ahead of time is that the first half of the book involves so much talk of past sexual abuse from family members to adults and children. The only thing that kept me going was the wonderful writing style and the hope the explicit sexual  abuse stops, which it does. 
I would have loved to give this book 5 stars but the first half of this book made me so uncomfortable, the best I can do is 3. So if you love family drama, back and forth in time stories, and are not triggered by sexual abuse, definitely give it a shot. But please be warned majority of sexual abuse happens to children of varying ages.
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clarebell23's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

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definebookish's review against another edition

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medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

2.0

Fifty pages into The Paper Palace, I went searching for strangers’ reviews. Those I’d read before picking up a copy had been overwhelmingly positive about the story of middle-aged Elle, torn between her good-egg husband Peter and childhood sweetheart Jonah in the present while reflecting on a traumatic past. I found myself struggling a lot with it, and wondering if others had.

I don’t think there are subjects that should be off limits for fiction. Many of the one-star reviews I found of The Paper Palace seemed to attribute their low rating to instances of child abuse in the story. Initially, I thought this was an odd response – like rating the evening news one-star because the headlines are disturbing. However, having finished the book, it’s this element that is most problematic for me. Not that the author has written about such a harrowing subject at all, or necessarily that she’s framed it within a romance. But in my opinion, the treatment of multiple characters’ unthinkable childhood trauma isn’t appropriately sensitive, and at times verges on sensationalist.

Beyond that, I’m ambivalent. The back woods Cape Cod setting is vividly drawn, and so is Elle’s mouse-infested family camp – the paper palace of the title, symbolic of family legacy and inherited trauma – almost to the point of nausea. The few scenes in England, however, hit somewhere between a Richard Curtis romcom, Taylor Swift’s London Boy, and 1980s episodes of Eastenders. (“F*ck off, ya c*nt,” says Elle’s pig-faced mugger. “He’ll be a bit cross when he comes to,” pipes up Elle’s rescuer and plummy future husband Peter, who lamps the scoundrel and offers her a lift in his Land Rover.)

The wider characterisation, too, I found patchy. Several secondary players are stereotypes; Peter’s English parents ‘disapprove of’ Americans, and both Elle’s stepmothers are essentially wicked. Grown-up Jonah feels like a (horny) sketch. The perpetrator of the abuse is skin-crawlingly well rendered, though that contributed to my reservations about the treatment of that storyline.

Elle is hugely sympathetic as a child, and I appreciated that the author chose to portray a middle-aged woman getting steamy. But there are also a few scenes in which adult Elle is deeply unpleasant as a narrator. In the first she describes the woman behind the counter at Avis as acting like she thinks she ‘works at the post office’ and walking ‘slow as mud.’ In the second, she’s furious when she’s racing to a loved one’s bedside and the hospital elevator is set to stop at every floor because it’s Shabbat – she’s always considered herself a tolerant person, but… Perhaps these are intended to show us something about the steely determination of her survival mode, but to me they felt entitled, especially in the wider context of this book’s WASPy world.

I didn’t like it.
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