A review by aasiy4h
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

my gosh. this book was, to say the least, a mess. not in a bad way, but still a mess. it took me well over a month to read, which was a lot longer than i anticipated. when i read the first 2 chapters, i had immediately rated it a 5 star read and i couldnt wait to read more. maybe thats because my expectations for this book were far out from what the reality was, but i definitely feel like the blurb helped in being misleading. it makes you think its a sad but light story of a friendship between 4 boys turning into men, but that could not have been farther from the reality. the reality is that the book is about jude, one of those boys, and his mysterious past full of sexual abuse, psychological abuse and genuine disgusting trauma that i wouldnt wish on my worst enemy. i dont ever get triggered by trigger warning topics so i typically choose to ignore them, as i did with this, and i dont regret not looking but i do think this book took it wayyy too far. everything was in such vivid detail i felt like i could see it right before my eyes. and in most books, thats a good thing because it shows how good an authors writing is. but with this, it wasnt pleasant. it was literally 720 pages of torture and pain and fucked up shit. im not a fan of long books but i always try to give them a go and this did not need to be that long. i think thats part of what makes it so slow is how you do have to pause and think for a hot minute before you carry on reading and just because of genuinely how many pages there are. when i was around halfway through i started googling what the inspiration was behind it or why hanya yanagihara actually wrote a little life because i thought, wow, if this was based off someones life or something that really is heartbreaking. but no. i looked through a fair few articles and interviews and i couldnt see any reason why she wrote this book. there was no victim whose story she wanted to tell, nothing from her own or her friends experiences, nothing from maybe even some sort of study that sparked an interest or compulsion to write it. nothing. which makes me think she wrote it out of some deep dark place within herself, because who comes up with this stuff from their imagination? i tend to think that every author has a purpose for writing a book, even if its just for pure entertainment, but this feels as if there was no purpose because there was no backstory, which kind of just makes it fucked up. it was just pure pain and torture and messed up situations and was definitely not for entertainment. however, in a strange way, even after all my negatives, it was still a book i was determined to finish and the writing style was so compelling even as it makes you want to stop reading. i think its messed up and selfish what jude had been through and what he did so in the end i had mixed feelings about his character, but other than that some of the other characters were very likeable. they were really well thought out, but i think jude was too thought out in the sense that some of the information laid on the reader was just so gruelling and not needed. 
but all in all, a 4/5 stars, which is probably too generous considering everything ive just said about it but oh well.
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