A review by jekaluleka
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

4.0

This was a great book. It's extremely well-written; the writing transports you to the world of the story, and the characters are larger than life. I love the messaging of people who don't fit like cogs into a machine being steamrolled by society until they do. All this being said, this book was /hella/ racist and misogynistic. The misogyny is maybe half-excusable because the main object of the misogyny (the Big Nurse) is more of a metaphor than anything, and all the comments about her body are meant to symbolize this interplay between The Combine/machinery of society and the physical humans who perpetuate it, but those parts were still pretty hard to read. The racism, on the other hand, serves no purpose that I can see and is inexcusable. I know for the time this book was radically progressive with its depiction of the problems in mental healthcare, but reading it now it feels very regressive. Still giving it 4 stars because it's genuinely a good book, and for its time was probably a great book.