Reviews tagging 'Police brutality'

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

13 reviews

dziggetai's review against another edition

adventurous emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Gore, Confinement, Forced institutionalization, Police brutality, Racism, Sexual content, Violence, and Transphobia

Moderate: Slavery, Excrement, Drug use, Alcohol, Classism, Murder, Colonisation, Cursing, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Vomit

singlier's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious fast-paced

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

4.0

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg 4/5 🦊s 

This book is weird--part memoir, part unhinged rambling footnotes, part collective memory. It reimagines the life of famous Victorian thief, Jack Sheppard, as a transgender man, exploring the intersections of his identity with period-accurate racism, incarceration, destruction of land, government corruption, and colonialism. It is also a story-within-a-story: told in the footnotes of the memoir is the story of Dr. Voth, a transgender man and college professor, currently grappling with the loss of his love and his debilitating OCD, who imprints onto Jack and uses the footnotes as the pedestal for self-reflection and anti-academia rhetoric. 

At the end of the novel, I can't say I understood everything. It is committed to its appearance as an authentic 18th century text, which means it is dense and difficult to parse. The footnotes only add to its difficulty: calling upon a vast array of knowledge from Marxism to queer theory. The plot too, often feels scattered: caught between a mysterious conspiracy of government corruption and Jack's unquestionable love for his partner. But, with all this, I still found myself thoroughly enjoying it. I could not predict where it would lead me, but I enjoyed the journey there. 

Minus points for a lot of mentions of piss, even though it does (eventually) become plot relevant.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Colonisation, Gore, Racism, Vomit, Sexual content, Blood, Classism, Excrement, Medical trauma, Police brutality, Injury/Injury detail, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Violence

caseythereader's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Vomit, Xenophobia, Confinement, Death, Dysphoria, Classism, Alcohol, Gore, Racism, Colonisation, Cursing, Suicidal thoughts, Transphobia, Deadnaming, Grief, Murder, Animal death, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Police brutality, Blood, Fire/Fire injury, Gun violence, Racial slurs, Sexual content, Excrement, and Violence

shipyrds's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

3.75 with the frame narrative, 4.5 if you skip the footnotes (shocking coming from me!) I held off on reviewing this for a while, because I wanted to percolate on it. I actually started reading the book way back in January in audio format, was moving through it fairly slowly, got concussed, and simply could not get back into it. Physical format was much more successful! In part, I think, the audio format does not handle the extensive and discursive footnotes particularly well, and in part because the beginning of the book is heavily concerned with Dr. Voth, and I simply didn't like him very much. I've read about a lot of sad-sack transmasc characters this year, and only some of them are enjoyable. He got a lot more bearable in print! 
That being said, the narrative of Jack Sheppard is well-done; Rosenberg nails a particular sort of 18th-century cadence (possibly anachronistic; I don't really care.) Jack's narration is as slippery as the thief himself, both poetic and crude. The end of the book is spectacular, and Bess's discussion of the Fens is lovely. 
Even in print, though, I found myself wishing the footnotes weren't there at all - as much as I enjoy a metanarrative, I think there's enough metanarrative present in the "18th century" portion itself, which touches on environmental destruction, the carceral state, the new calcification of racial categories, and transgender lives and loves. I don't think the book actually needed our modern day Dr. Voth in order to make the narrative speak to the present; it does that just fine on its own without the frame narrative, and I ended up getting distracted trying to track the details of his near-future academic dystopia. 
So, overall: great book, loved Jack and Bess, (shockingly for me) could have done without the frame!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Transphobia, Slavery, Xenophobia, Racism, Police brutality, and Medical content

ninjamuse's review against another edition

challenging slow-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? It's complicated

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Confinement, Death of parent, and Police brutality

Moderate: Transphobia, Sexual content, Colonisation, and Classism

Minor: Forced institutionalization

katiewhocanread's review against another edition

challenging funny fast-paced

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

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Police brutality, Forced institutionalization, Sexual content, and Gore

Moderate: Racism and Deadnaming

Minor: Racial slurs and Mental illness

morelsupport's review against another edition

emotional hopeful slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I thought this would be a book about being a thief, but it was actually a book about transitioning (this is a highly simplified plot summary). I thought it was really interesting how it incorporated anti-capitalism and anti-racism and transness into the story, but I honestly didn't find it very engaging, and I wasn't tense at the points where I was supposed to be tense. The thing I enjoyed the most were the footnotes, and the way that the person who was reading these confessions was a character in the same way that the subjects of the confessions were characters. I also really liked the resources provided. However, I just honestly didn't find this that engaging, and it was very jarring when modern concepts of transness were inserted in this supposed firsthand source. I really wished that Jack's feats of thievery that got him famous were more prominent. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content, Dysphoria, Racism, and Transphobia

Moderate: Police brutality

carbs666's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious medium-paced

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

5.0

Deeply researched and lovingly crafted, this book is like nothing I've ever read before. Confessions layered on top of confessions, the inherent queerness of the disobedient archive, funny and insightful and personal footnotes, unreliable and fantastical and multiplicitous narration, a utopia outside of time, an escape. It's good. You have to read it. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content, Medical content, Dysphoria, Alcohol, Confinement, Police brutality, Injury/Injury detail, and Colonisation

Moderate: Death, Medical content, Police brutality, Suicidal thoughts, Vomit, Blood, Body horror, Racism, and Transphobia

laurajsmith's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Medical content and Medical trauma

Minor: Alcohol, Blood, Body horror, Police brutality, and Sexual content

bronzeageholly's review against another edition

adventurous inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Sexual content, Police brutality, Murder, and Medical content

Moderate: Blood, Death of parent, Transphobia, Drug use, and Alcohol

Minor: Vomit