A review by wizurd101
Normal People Don't Live Like This by Dylan Landis
4.0
fantastic sentences and moments throughout. There were sections where I had chills for pages and pages. I ended up really liking the fragmented, never get a satisfying ending structure, because the plot was less important than the characters and the crazy power dynamics made so plain.
one thing I didn't like was how obviously mental illness was used as characterization. It worked and was powerful, but Leah's tapping is pretty much just used in the beginning to make her slightly more special and (eventually) make her feel similar to her mother. On the other hand, Helen's vague OCD was done in a much more nuanced and exciting way. Also the fact pretty much all the people in the story were Fucked Up TM in a Wikipediable way was perhaps lame: it felt like many characters had their own pre-packed mental illness that basically defined them. I just didn't like how, throughout the book, horrible things felt like literary devices. The first sentence is a perfect example of this. It is shocking and gut wrenching but that chapter isn't even about the main characters, it is just to shock and keep people reading.
LOVED the ending and that whole sequence. The dynamics were so intense and so strange between the three. Sex as a drive, social expectations as a drive, self-sacrifice and self-loathing as drives. Loved the end of Helen's arc too. The book was really intense lol. Glad I read it, I think the end could inspire me to be less neurotic sometimes.
one thing I didn't like was how obviously mental illness was used as characterization. It worked and was powerful, but Leah's tapping is pretty much just used in the beginning to make her slightly more special and (eventually) make her feel similar to her mother. On the other hand, Helen's vague OCD was done in a much more nuanced and exciting way. Also the fact pretty much all the people in the story were Fucked Up TM in a Wikipediable way was perhaps lame: it felt like many characters had their own pre-packed mental illness that basically defined them. I just didn't like how, throughout the book, horrible things felt like literary devices. The first sentence is a perfect example of this. It is shocking and gut wrenching but that chapter isn't even about the main characters, it is just to shock and keep people reading.
LOVED the ending and that whole sequence. The dynamics were so intense and so strange between the three. Sex as a drive, social expectations as a drive, self-sacrifice and self-loathing as drives. Loved the end of Helen's arc too. The book was really intense lol. Glad I read it, I think the end could inspire me to be less neurotic sometimes.