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A review by wunkymatts
Full Immersion by Gemma Amor
3.0
This book showed me why it's good being in a book club. I don't think, from the blurb, I would have picked it up in a shop. It read a bit too 'sci fi' for me.
There are moments of this book that are truly heart rendering and really made me think about my own mental health. In particular how I would describe it after seeing how Magpie described hers. It is an ambitious book, exploring some really big and complex themes and there are times when the emotional vulnerability, and the strength it must have taken to write it, sings from the page.
Perhaps this is part of the problem. The two sides of the book did not always fit well together. There are probably two books here and I'm not sure Amor has really managed to knit them together.
Some passages, especially in the beginning, were overwritten. When I was trying to really get into the book I was getting bogged down in overly descriptive passages describing things and scenes that didn't seem to help the book along at all. The ending was also quite baggy, dragging on past the point where perhaps it should have ended. The ending itself also let the book down. After being so complex having an ending where the heroine is literally rescued by the hero and they walk off into the sunset (while Bristol is consumed by the physical manifestation of her trauma) fell very flat and a bit clichéd.
There are moments of this book that are truly heart rendering and really made me think about my own mental health. In particular how I would describe it after seeing how Magpie described hers. It is an ambitious book, exploring some really big and complex themes and there are times when the emotional vulnerability, and the strength it must have taken to write it, sings from the page.
Perhaps this is part of the problem. The two sides of the book did not always fit well together. There are probably two books here and I'm not sure Amor has really managed to knit them together.
Some passages, especially in the beginning, were overwritten. When I was trying to really get into the book I was getting bogged down in overly descriptive passages describing things and scenes that didn't seem to help the book along at all. The ending was also quite baggy, dragging on past the point where perhaps it should have ended. The ending itself also let the book down. After being so complex having an ending where the heroine is literally rescued by the hero and they walk off into the sunset (while Bristol is consumed by the physical manifestation of her trauma) fell very flat and a bit clichéd.