marimo's reviews
4 reviews
Every Day by David Levithan
Did not finish book. Stopped at 55%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 55%.
More creepy than charming. Who tries to provoke someone's boyfriend into cheating + breaking up after knowing a girl for only a few days? What a freak.
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Immediately compelling. I bingeread this in maybe ~5 hours and it was worth every minute. Melanie is a fantastic main character, and the other characters all have well developed personalities and motivations that compare and contrast with each other. Dialogue is never dry, and there's a thread of grey morality through the novel that no character is left untouched from. I also really enjoyed the science. Well paced and brutal. Really, really good read.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I really wanted to like Battle Royale! It's a classic, and had been on my reading list for years, so I had high hopes. But it just doesn't hold up to the hype.
The main characters are bland and mostly one dimensional, their individual stories were not engaging and they had little to no character development through the novel. It was repetitive, and every interesting character introduced was killed off shortly after. Not even the main antagonist is interesting; he's stupidly overpowered to the point that literally no character can stand up to him. That might be forgiveable if he had a personality to make up for it, but no. The other main antagonist is well developed, but
The plot itself is interesting... but that's it. There's nothing else to hold it up. It isn't well paced either; a scene worth powering through followed by a scene I skim until it's interesting again followed by a scene that makes me put the book down and read something better.
I understand why it's a classic, but you're better off sticking to the movie in this case.
The main characters are bland and mostly one dimensional, their individual stories were not engaging and they had little to no character development through the novel. It was repetitive, and every interesting character introduced was killed off shortly after. Not even the main antagonist is interesting; he's stupidly overpowered to the point that literally no character can stand up to him. That might be forgiveable if he had a personality to make up for it, but no. The other main antagonist is well developed, but
Spoiler
she's also killed off by the overpowered main antagonist like she's nothing despite proving herself a threat earlier in the novel.The plot itself is interesting... but that's it. There's nothing else to hold it up. It isn't well paced either; a scene worth powering through followed by a scene I skim until it's interesting again followed by a scene that makes me put the book down and read something better.
I understand why it's a classic, but you're better off sticking to the movie in this case.
The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
Did not finish book. Stopped at 40%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 40%.
Awful. I was promised a dark queer fantasy and got a glorified rapist & pedophile, a stupid gender system that's barely explored, and the rep that's delivered on is... lacking. Not nearly as bad as the rest, but it also introduced eight povs in twenty one chapters, one of which had TWENTY ENTIRE CHAPTERS between a character's introduction chapter and their following one, by which I'd completely forgotten she existed. That itself is a crime. I need fantasy (and scifi) authors to realize that the flipped dynamic of women dominating men is tiresome unless you use it to say something about society or the world you've built (because why else would you write it that way?) but instead of that Kameron Hurley sure did deliver on the abusive rapist war criminal front. Thank god for that.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Emotional abuse, and Blood
Moderate: Pedophilia
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