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A review by bug_lightyear
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
3.25
I quite enjoyed the first half of the book where it's a nice and quaint story with an intriguing thing going on.
But then it turns into a love affair with a married man, who is the husband of the main character's new friend, and when we understand that the "virgin birth" is actually likelyrape of an unconscious young woman by a mentally ill tennager it suddenly becomes quite horrific as a looming possibility and it doesn't feel adressed seriously enough.
This book has many disabled/sick/chronically ill characters as well as lesbian characters, which should be great, but they are written to be detestable, annoying, and the fault for everything going wrong in everyone else's life.
I don't think I ever read a book where main characters have rheumatoid arthritis, and after my own experience in a rehab clinic I was interested to read about my counterpart in a 1950's sanatorium. But this place is used as the backdrop for a very sordid plot twist where the bad guy is a mentally ill teenager.
The lesbian love story could have been sweet, but the lover is portrayed as an annoying and dirty character who is just wrecking the almost perfect marriage of the main character's new friend.
We need more disability and queer rep in books, but not like that.
Finally the afterword feels quite tone deaf to me. The author heard about a tragedy fitting her timeline and uses it as a looming catastrophy about to happen to the characters, but we never read what happened. In the afterword the author writes that it was a horrific event that traumatised a generation of people, families and victims who still recount the events all these decades later. To have this traumatising event used as an "interesting" narrative device felt quite insensitive to me.
But then it turns into a love affair with a married man, who is the husband of the main character's new friend, and when we understand that the "virgin birth" is actually likely
This book has many disabled/sick/chronically ill characters as well as lesbian characters, which should be great, but they are written to be detestable, annoying, and the fault for everything going wrong in everyone else's life.
I don't think I ever read a book where main characters have rheumatoid arthritis, and after my own experience in a rehab clinic I was interested to read about my counterpart in a 1950's sanatorium. But this place is used as the backdrop for a very sordid plot twist where the bad guy is a mentally ill teenager.
The lesbian love story could have been sweet, but the lover is portrayed as an annoying and dirty character who is just wrecking the almost perfect marriage of the main character's new friend.
We need more disability and queer rep in books, but not like that.
Finally the afterword feels quite tone deaf to me. The author heard about a tragedy fitting her timeline and uses it as a looming catastrophy about to happen to the characters, but we never read what happened. In the afterword the author writes that it was a horrific event that traumatised a generation of people, families and victims who still recount the events all these decades later. To have this traumatising event used as an "interesting" narrative device felt quite insensitive to me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape, Abortion, and Lesbophobia