femmenova's review against another edition
challenging
- Loveable characters? No
For full disclosure: I DNF-ed it at 42 pages and I only got that far into the book because I was trying to make sense of what I was reading. There's just so much exposition dump and sexual and racial violence casually mentioned for the sake of.. shock? To show how post-apocalyptic the state of the world is? The writing is dense and convoluted for the sake of introducing many different stories to understand a character more but I don't see it. The book boasts that it is genre-bending but that phrase feels like a catch-all to pretend that this book was something more than what it was which was: clunky writing, bad pacing, the awkward transition between characters that I thought it was a collection of short stories instead, and bad character studies.
Between that and finding out that the author is a whole ass non-Black person, which immediately made me reading the work uncomfortable because of the casual N-word being thrown around and how every Black supporting person in the book is hated by the main character(s).
Listen, I have read a lot of dark literary books that does not have a single redeeming character in them. Books like The Black Cathedral are of a similar tone to this one but the writing was far more simplistic and the millions of characters that were written were developed in a Show-Not-Dump way.
Not for me at all which sucks because I was excited to read this!
Between that and finding out that the author is a whole ass non-Black person, which immediately made me reading the work uncomfortable because of the casual N-word being thrown around and how every Black supporting person in the book is hated by the main character(s).
Listen, I have read a lot of dark literary books that does not have a single redeeming character in them. Books like The Black Cathedral are of a similar tone to this one but the writing was far more simplistic and the millions of characters that were written were developed in a Show-Not-Dump way.
Not for me at all which sucks because I was excited to read this!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Homophobia, Addiction, Fatphobia, Sexual assault, Racial slurs, Sexual violence, Murder, and Drug use
horizonous's review against another edition
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Racial slurs, Rape, and Transphobia
Moderate: Drug use, Homophobia, and Sexual content
Minor: Abortion, Child abuse, and Pedophilia
◦ Sexual content = Prostitution
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