Reviews tagging 'Physical abuse'

Bedenke Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

2 reviews

drkshadow's review against another edition

Go to review page


Expand filter menu Content Warnings

jjjreads's review against another edition

Go to review page

One of the most boring books I've ever read. A solid 90% of the portion I read did not need to be in the book. It was totally irrelevant. Whole chapters should have been a single sentence, if that. The worldbuilding is pretty cool, but the few interesting facts are so buried in a morass of the useless, petty goings-on of the unlikeable main character you almost don't notice them, and even if you do the reeking misogyny negates them anyway.

Again: the main character was boring an unlikeable (by which I do not mean he was a bad person - I mean, he was, but that's not why he was unlikeable. It'd be more accurate to say it was impossible to think of him as a real person, and even if you managed it was impossible to care about him), the events occurring on any given page do not constitute a plot, there are precious few if any bits and pieces that almost could have made up for it, and the sheer overwhelming grossness of a few (again, totally irrelevant) scenes tipped the scale into making this totally unreadable.

I kept reading and reading, thinking that surely it'd get better eventually, surely after this scene something relevant or interesting or vaguely pertaining to the plot would happen, and I was continuously wrong. Oh, and to top it all off, the two characters who have no personality beyond not speaking the language (it's creepy how silenced they are) and being lesbians are
killed off for literally no reason. That is, one of them dies, so the other one goes and immediately gets herself killed on purpose.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings