Reviews with content warning for Child death - Total: Stories

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

Total: Stories by Rebecca Miller

6 reviews

b_arose's review against another edition

dark emotional medium-paced

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

I am shocked anyone could call this good writing. I tried reading this aloud to others and all said the same thing - the writing is terrible and the sentence structure is abhorrent. Miller has a love for the grotesque and describing everything in this fashion, using vocabulary that seems as though she has used a thesaurus to sound fancier than needed, often making the writing seem more clumsy and complicated than necessary . It becomes hard to read when the unusual descriptions find themselves contradicting or not making clear sense of what she's trying to say. It comes across rambled like she's using these words to avoid getting to the point. Sometimes using a thesaurus to find an unusual word isn't needed. Just say what you mean!

I don't understand how anyone could enjoy this extremely negative collection of 7 stories that centre around classist, homophobic at many points, and unsettling characters with no real purpose to the plot. It felt pointless, like Miller doesn't have a defined point of view other than making female characters ugly, twisted and ultimately unlikable with no personality, defining characteristics other than vapid and irrational behaviour. Extremely disappointed. I kept putting the book down because it was so much effort to try and get through this unenjoyable experience of reading.

1. Mrs Covet

Really interesting story, well paced with a quick twist and ending but easy to understand. A strong start to the book about a pregnant mother who is overwhelmed by domestic labour and is gifted a housekeeper/nanny/nurse by her Mother-in-Law who takes over the house. The husband is a wet fish who is irrelevant to the story.

2. I Want You To Know

Probably the most awful story I have ever read. I really wanted to give up on this book immediately as I read the first couple of pages of this story of a woman named Joad (yes really) who live in a dilapidated farm house bought off a man who lives with his Mother who sexually pleases her dog (I didn't appreciate that description) and gets day drunk, to discover a typewriter and letter about a woman who joined the army because she wanted free boots, got married and then killed her children. This felt so disconnected and all over the place and then went back to the original, incredibly boring story where Joad freaks out about living in a murder house.

Is long for the sake of being long, a lot of words about nothing but a woman masterbating a dog, then a story within about a woman who has shitting lions in her mind. Awfully random with no real substance or point. It was 2/3 stories in one and just felt so uncomfortable to read and underdeveloped as an idea, like she didn't know what she was writing as she was going and trying to make something stick.

3. Vapours

The main character Justine is a serial cheater on men who are nice and mean well, very into her with guys who are so dull and uninteresting (one guy repeatedly throws sand in her face on a beach date!?). There is a page where we find out she cheated on her high school boyfriend Hal, went to college and got a new boyfriend Elliot, broke up with him and got back together, meanwhile she went on a work trip and hooked up with her ex boyfriend Carlos, who she got together with by cheating on her boyfriend at the time Ben but Carlos ended it because she cheated on him with a guy named Larry. So she went back to her college boyfriend Elliot and cheated on him with Carlos and Hal. As if that is totally normal behaviour. Then we are introduced to Joseph, a weird ill looking photographer who takes pictures of dead things, skulls and her naked on plates of sausages!? She describes sex in this awful line "There was a slight bondage-y aspect to the sex, but that was really nothing compared to the bondage of everyday life." and then goes on to describe threatening, toxic and violent behaviour from him that is abusive to her.

Elliott gets married and notices Justine is being abused, tells her father who sends her to France. She meets a French horse vet and gets pregnant 6 months later.

She doesn't describe the men at all apart from Joseph and slightly Hal, but Elliot deserves more expansion as he seems nice and stable but that's me projecting as there is no description of him other than he cares for his brother's sick dog whilst his brother works at a hospital.

Justine is not described either as anything other than a photographer and a girl who smoked at school. There are no qualities that we as a reader can connect or clutch to. It's just a basic describing of events with extensive vocabulary. Hardly good writing.

4. Total

An unusual sci-fi story about a mother who invents a phone that curses women with alien babies who have deformed triangular heads, big eyes and tiny teeth - unable to care for themselves and have to go to a facility to be cared for until they die.

The 16 year old sister of this 'Total' named E breaks her out of the care centre with her friend at boarding school and takes her on a tour bus with a band to LA where she has a crush on one of the guys and whilst giving a blowjob in this music venue E tries to fend for herself and bleeds to death.

We then jump to the sister Roxanne pregnant with a fear of having a Total but in the space of a paragraph has the child who is normal and healthy and describes how amazing breast feeding is and the story ends.

The writing has a mix of over complicated description and repetitive language, some words literally next to each other and dialogue described as 'he said, I said, he said, I said' which is so boring. The fact some of the sentences are over fussing makes it difficult to get a sense of flow and read with a nice pace. Especially as the story is packing a lot of different scene changes, characters and movements in, most of whom are totally unnecessary and add nothing to the story or narrative. It's like a lot of abandoned ideas strung together and pushed into one plot. There's a real focus on how sexy she finds her friend Holly, constantly describing her body (even though she's a minor) and her doing sexual acts with boys and drugs and aspirations to be a stripper. Placing these characters as school girls who run away with a band is just odd.

This story alone took me so long to read as I kept putting the book down and just couldn't bring myself to finish it.

5. She Came To Me

An ironic story about a novellist looking for their next book in such poor writing that is just filled with description and no substance. Three descriptive words in a row for a single sentence that is out of context forming unnecessary barriers to understand what is actually being said. Again more he said, she said to describe a single interaction.

The novellist goes to town and the opening is the longest way to describe parking I have ever read. He picks up his old book and puts in back, goes to a pub meets an ugly American girl who pays for his drink and sandwich he doesn't eat and he cheats on his long term marriage and children with this random woman who he claims he doesn't want to have sex in and has no interest in. There are no redeeming qualities to any of the characters, they are simple there being unlikable and weird. The American is an obsessive who bought a separate hotel room to have sex with strangers and becomes attached to him so he literally runs home to his wife.

If the character didn't want to sleep with the American, why did he? There's no reason or justification, he describes all the gross things about her and how he doesn't want to experience her. But does.

This has potential to be more interesting as a story but fell short figuratively and literally as it was one of the shorter stories in the book.

6. Receipts

The opening is as a jumpy as a frog in a box, chaotically trying to pull sentences together like a train of thought that isn't connected. Referring to a child as it rather than they was a grammatical annoyance that really sets up the rest of the writing. The editing of this book is so poor and this story is no exception. Things that shouldn't be in the same paragraph pushed together incoherently. If you ever had doubts about writing a book, this is proof that anything can get published.

In her cups and termite queen as normal phrases about a girl telling a story of her parents at a party when she's a child, then on an aeroplane leaving her partner alone on their anniversary to sell inhalers at a conference before flirting with a sales rep and when he kisses her and she sees it as one sided, instead of stopping she blows him.

She goes home, her partner has ordered them food and wants children, they break up and 10 years later she is happy in her dream apartment with her own company. The title is so forced based on a few lines and if this story wasn't so short it may have had more depth to go somewhere but it just felt rushed like she had a word count and was trying to pack as much in as she could.

7. The Chekhovians

One of the more readable stories jumping between 2 families, one new money with wealth, one old money without as next door neighbours. Where the new money family are celebrating the marriage of a girl Alex and her partner Mac who doesn't know she's rich and does a charcoal drawing on a white sofa and then leaves a black mark on it (why of all the places to use charcoal you would choose a white sofa is just annoying) and then the second family are made into a joke where the author fat shames a pubescent 14 year old who somehow in 8 months has gone from being skinny and flat chested to over weight and clumsy knocking into things because she's so huge. It's really uncomfortable to read her shaming a child so horribly.

The jumps between the families is a bit random in some parts but not too bad, it just feels very disconnected at times.

The scene were she details her breasts and people looking at them is weird and just not needed. There's so much focus on sexualising her it's odd. Then the groom kisses this child on the beach, again gross. Then she goes home and sleeps.

Content Warnings

junglejelly's review

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emotional funny reflective medium-paced

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

3.75

Overall I did enjoy the book but it was due to Miller's incredible writing and the variation between the stories.

Otherwise, most of the characters felt too stereotypical to really be fleshed out and likeable characters.

My favourite of the short stories was 'Total' by a mile followed by 'I Want You to Know'

Content Warnings

laurataylor's review

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emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

lily7's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

3.5

Thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for an advanced copy of this ebook.

This is a collection of 7 short stories, and I found it to be a real mixed bag. I did not enjoy the first three stories, persevering only because the book itself is pretty short, but the final four - particularly the titular story - just about make it a worthwhile read overall.

The first story didn’t feel particularly intriguing; the plot is pretty straightforward but there is none of the tension or sense of foreboding that I think you would expect as you reach the climax of it. Or maybe I didn’t get what Miller was trying to achieve with it. In any case, the main character in this story is unlikable, but not in any way that I can get on board with, so it just wasn’t one to work with. The second story is quite long - or felt long - withouht going anywhere. The idea is interesting, I just felt the mystery it was trying to cultivate needed much more time to develop. The third was not especially grabbing, unfortunately.

Total, the fourth story and the turning-point in this collection, is a really interesting sci-fi dystopia. For me, there were echoes of Never Let Me Go and The Handmaid’s Tale, and although happy with the story as it was, I would happily read a whole novel based on the ideas and story created here. Stories 5 and 6 are interestingly woven stories: I found the characters engaging and the stories themselves felt more complete and tightly worked. And The Chekhovians is a great final story - lots of characters to keep track of, but I thought it was a finely observed and brutal episode of a family drama.

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kateflood's review against another edition

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4.0

This is a solid collection of mildly unsettling short stories. Though the tonal shift between some of the stories occasionally felt a bit jarring (and not in a way which felt intentional), overall these stories were engaging with a cast of interesting characters and settings which had real depth. The writing in this collection is beautiful and I will definitely be reading other works by this author!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for letting me read an e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

Content Warnings

rzh's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

thank you to netgalley and canongate for providing me with a free copy of this collection in exchange for an unbiased review.
this collection was a mixed bag to say the least. my initial impressions with the first few stories was not entirely favourable: i feel like they were trying to have the plot and forward motion of a novel as well as the cinematically detailed vignettes of a short story, eventually succeeding in creating neither. the second story, for example, feels like it wanted to launch into a long-form mystery by the second half, but by that point had already set up the slow pace and evocative setting of a short story: though many short stories end abruptly (and often to great effect): this just read like a half-baked novella. in the third story, too, we are introduced to about six characters in the space of a page, which makes me wonder whether this too was ever conceived as, or indeed could be sensibly conceived as, a short story rather than a novel or novella. however, perhaps as a direct result of my initial underwhelmed reaction to the first few stories, the eponymous story of the collection really took my breath away with how great it was: a sort of dystopian sci-fi story that reminded me of ishiguro's never let me go in its subject matter and margaret atwood in its tone. masterfully written and truly haunting.
the remaining few short stories also really worked. they created carver-esque vignettes of the character's lives that felt self-contained and impressively emotionally resonant for their lack of length. getting to the end of these remaining few stories and realising that miller has such talent in story-weaving and prose made me reflect on whether perhaps i just found the characters in the first few stories too annoying. perhaps. in any case, i'm glad i did keep going with this past the first half, because it was worth it.

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