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readingpicnic's review against another edition
3.0
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Grove Atlantic for a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
This book started off very strong with setting up the family dynamics that largely stayed throughout the whole book, which moves slowly through the family’s lives and deaths. Ollie is a strong personality that kept my interest the whole book, even when she wasn’t always present. There are lots of conversations and ponderings on how your childhood home environment traumatizes you in less obvious ways that influence how you react to situations in adulthood. I will say that Amy was a very passive voice in this story that didn’t do much for me personally; she was Nick and Ollie was Gatsby in terms of Ollie feeling like the MAIN character who everything revolved around. Since the book is called Shred Sisters, I would have preferred for Ollie to have been more of a character than she was—it seemed like she was mostly defined by her mental illnesses and manic episodes, only really settling down when becoming a mother, which was…a strange way to resolve the book I think. I’m personally wary of books where motherhood is posed as a solution to a character’s life problems. There was also some casual fatphobia thrown in with the main character feeling glad and superior that her ex and his wife gained weight, and I can’t tell if that’s just an in-character thing for her to think??? The storytelling method also put me off quite a bit with the character occasionally speaking with insight from the present tense and commenting on moments of her life, which I wasn’t the biggest fan of. It began to feel like the jumps in time were essentially “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then I got a different lover, and then…” which I got tired of after a while. Again, I really enjoyed the beginning, and I wish that the book had stayed there longer (or for its entirety). A dual pov with Ollie also would have been interesting. Overall, I think the movement through time in this story wasn’t executed very well, and I lost interest towards the end.
This book started off very strong with setting up the family dynamics that largely stayed throughout the whole book, which moves slowly through the family’s lives and deaths. Ollie is a strong personality that kept my interest the whole book, even when she wasn’t always present. There are lots of conversations and ponderings on how your childhood home environment traumatizes you in less obvious ways that influence how you react to situations in adulthood. I will say that Amy was a very passive voice in this story that didn’t do much for me personally; she was Nick and Ollie was Gatsby in terms of Ollie feeling like the MAIN character who everything revolved around. Since the book is called Shred Sisters, I would have preferred for Ollie to have been more of a character than she was—it seemed like she was mostly defined by her mental illnesses and manic episodes, only really settling down when becoming a mother, which was…a strange way to resolve the book I think. I’m personally wary of books where motherhood is posed as a solution to a character’s life problems. There was also some casual fatphobia thrown in with the main character feeling glad and superior that her ex and his wife gained weight, and I can’t tell if that’s just an in-character thing for her to think??? The storytelling method also put me off quite a bit with the character occasionally speaking with insight from the present tense and commenting on moments of her life, which I wasn’t the biggest fan of. It began to feel like the jumps in time were essentially “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then I got a different lover, and then…” which I got tired of after a while. Again, I really enjoyed the beginning, and I wish that the book had stayed there longer (or for its entirety). A dual pov with Ollie also would have been interesting. Overall, I think the movement through time in this story wasn’t executed very well, and I lost interest towards the end.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Addiction, Death, Mental illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Death of parent
Moderate: Bullying, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Infidelity, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, Grief, and Sexual harassment
Minor: Sexual assault and Lesbophobia