Reviews tagging 'Emotional abuse'

Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice

1 review

iellv's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.25

Slow as hell but for good reason (even though this took me 2 months to finish). I disagree that Tonio's side adventures held little value if they all contributed to illustrating the richness of his life and his identity outside of revenge. Anyway. This book is well worth the effort of getting through it for what it says about gender, sexuality, identity, and family--all in relation to patriarchy. I went into this expecting to gain a lot of insight into the first three, and I did! But I did not expect the latter two to stand out so much. More than once I found myself wishing that I'd read Engels's "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" before getting into this. I really should read it soon. 

I know this book is kind of divisive, but I'm glad to be one of the people who really enjoyed it! I don't know if I'll ever read another Anne Racist novel, though... no matter how much I like her writing style. Maybe IWTV but that's it.

But dear god please heed the warnings. You can check the spoiler tag below for an even more specific warning that can't be captured by the content warning tags.

There's a lot of pedophilia here. Guido was a victim of it but so is Tonio. I'm not gonna undersell it just because the story takes place in 18th century Italy, but since that's the norm for this book I'm gonna put that aside for the moment to mention that there's also lot of r*pe fantasy in here. There's also just the egregious and baffling usage of the word to describe rough sex.
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