Reviews with content warning for Miscarriage - Gallinas

This is definitely one for those who love a book that is mostly about characters and atmosphere, there’s not a lot plot driven action happening. I love a character driven book and the atmosphere and writing of this was delightful. Really easy to read. It’s not as complex and nuanced as I might have liked but I definitely enjoyed it.

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kld2128's review against another edition

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reflective sad fast-paced

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

3.75

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kelsoups's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

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

2.75

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caseythereader's review against another edition

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emotional reflective fast-paced

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

4.0

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gw7's review against another edition

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lighthearted reflective relaxing medium-paced

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

2.5

I'm giving this 2.5 stars in the sense that it feels halfway to a perfect book, not that it was (necessarily) bad.

I do seem to disagree with some reviewers on some points though. I don't think it was that well written. It made sense as a debut and I think if Polzin were to write more books, this is a great starting point. But, along with a style that was fairly regularly difficult to understand (in need of a good edit grammatically, in my taste), it was written in a way that practically every line could have been the first line of a book? If not every line (although basically) certainly every first line of every chapter. And broadly speaking, I feel like this was a huge contributor to the book feeling a bit lackluster? Looking back over it, there was no character development, not a clear timeline (so while the whole book felt wallowing, aside from being informed that the book took place over a year or two?) no real sense of story, even though we were given very significant moments from her life that would in any other book... denote a story? Because it's fine if there's no plot in a book, and it's fine if a book just explores themes, but I don't feel like the themes were explored well enough for it to be a book solely where themes were explored and... there was a plot... but it just felt to be delivered as a post-it-notes still on the wall, planning stage mind map, due to the writing style.

There were some lovely moments and lovely lines- the depiction of grief (in the brief lines were it is described and not in the overall writing) was beautiful and brilliant, but I wanted more.

The information about the chickens was wrong quite often. Or maybe while not wrong, written in a way that the author seemed to want to get a writable point out of a chicken's behaviour and so wrote that behaviour as if they did it for a particular reason or that they always do it a specific way or innumerable other iterations. While I'm a big chicken fan and knew that going into this book it wasn't going to be nearly enough about chickens for my liking, what I actually got, contrary to my expectations, was a book that was quite often writing about chickens, but from the mc's neurotic point of view.

The characters. I did not like. Apart from the side characters that I didn't see enough of to hate. Percy, again, seems to be the prime person example of being used in the same literary way as the chickens. I get that the author is making a satire of 'this is how the world works' but it wasn't done well enough to be that over the top. I don't know why the mc liked her husband. I don't know what the main character's personality was other than clingy to the point of detriment needing therapy later in life mother. Again, there could have been a point to this and an exploration of this through the plot of the book... but I don't feel there was.

The sections about cleaning also made no sense and could be lumped in with the random lines (mainly at the start) where it felt explicitly as though the author had gone searching the internet for the perfect happenstance in history, geography, etc. just to include a line about it in her book as though it's perfectly common knowledge, a perfectly normal (though novel cause isn't she so clever writing these big concepts in the book) thing to slide into casual conversation, though thankfully these instances did seem to drop off as the book went on, giving the feeling that she was getting more comfortable with writing. I'm glad they did drop off though cause it was starting to get a bit pretentious and not like other girls-y.

It was a fine book to read and while I had these issues, I didn't particularly find anything missing while I was reading it, I only had in mind the things wrong or that could be improved. But getting to the end, I sorely missed the plot. There was such great potential. It feels kind of like there was nothing there. Again, very promising, though. Truly excellent lines about grief, and I'm assuming the reason the author wanted to write the book. And I'm thankful she did write it. And another promising thing is that it seemed to get less unbearable as it went on- the first 50 ish pages expecting a dnf and wouldn't have dreamed of it from 150 pages to the end. Perhaps an unfortunate anecdote to end, though, is that I would have been exponentially more frustrated with the book had it not had the gorgeous chickens illustrated on the cover.

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