Started: 13/02/20
Finished: 29/02/20
Spoilers: No
Oh god. This was painful. It was so melodramatic, it almost hurt.
This took me far longer to read then it had a right to because I didn't want to read it in the end. The only reasons I didn't DNF is because it's short, and because I wanted to finish it all purely so I could adequately crucify it.
Unpopular opinion time and I don't even care.
I'm not pulling punches. It's rant time.
Characters
Jesus christ, talk about bland! Not a single one of these characters had a personality to share between them least of all the narrator, Cadence. She was so empty, so nothing at all. She was just a non-character.
Everyone was just so fucking awful. The mum, the aunts. The granddad, the children. Literally everyone was horrible and without a single redeemable quality.
I couldn't keep track of which kids belonged to which aunt. Even though there's a family tree in the front of the book, I didn't care enough to refer to it.
Plot
I'm so confused. This book won a Goodreads choice award. Not only did so many people enjoy it. But so many people enjoyed it enough to vote for it.
I don't even. . .
I can't. . .
My head hurts.
So, yeah, I understand the message of this story. The three aunts, blinded by their greed for the family inheritance money, try to turn the cousins against each other, and the cousins don't stand for it.
The message is there, it's just really poorly executed.
But because the kids took matters into their own hands in such and UNBELIEVABLY IRRESISTIBLE WAY, I have zero sympathy for any of then. Who the fuck decides that the only way to solve all you problems is to do what these kids do?
THAT NOT NORMAL, I'M AFRAID.
WHERE IS YOUR LOGIC??
What I'm trying to say, is I want at all convince by the reasoning behind their actions. Their 'poor-me' rich kid problems aren't strong enough problems to warrant what they did. GTFO.
It wasn't until half way through that I realised, to my horror, that this is basically Wuthering Heights meets King Lear!
No wonder I don't like it. There's only one book in this world that I actually hate. I think you can probably guess what book that is.
And there's only two Shakespeare plays I can't stand. One is Taming of the Shrew (which is more or less Wuthering Heights). Take a wild guess what the other one is.
It was an amalgam of everything I hate about the two squashed into too few pages for it to ever feel fully developed.
This feels and reads like a poorly written first draft. The absolute bare bones of a story. Which would explain its size. So much about this feels unfinished. It's trying way too hard to be profound but the writing is so subpar that I can't even begin to try and take it seriously.
Question: why are all these people writing on their hands? How are they even writing on their own hands? I know for a fact my left hand game is worse than a child's best. And who the fuck writes stuff they want to remember on their hands anyway? Write it on your phones, I know you have them.
And don't even get me started of the bullshit with the dogs. I hate this shit in books so much. I guessed it so early on too, so I had a very long time to be angry about before it was revealed.
Setting
Probably the most interesting thing about this book, and even that feels underdeveloped.
Writing Style
This is kind of odd, and it makes me think that if this book were on submission it wouldn't stand a chance getting published.
This book does so many of the 'writing don'ts' that I almost don't know whether it's intentional.
We've got Telling over Showing, list style info-dumps, and a boat load of passive voice.
These are huge no-nos in writing. And though the story has a voice, I just can't get over how mechanically and emotionlessly it reads. There's something almost clinical about the prose. It's like this throughout, so you can kiss goodbye to any chance of connecting to Cadence.
She's the dullest narrator I've ever read.
There's a ridiculous paragraph about a witch smashing her head in with a goose statue. It wasn't until I read the whole paragraph that I realised she only had a migraine.
This fucking book gave me a migraine.
And that scene right at the start when her dad leaves and she says he gets in the car, pulls out a gun and shoots her in the chest. I was shook. I thought, wow, this book is already taking unexpected turns. I was excited. But no. It was just a bloody metaphor. *eye roll.*
The dialogue is shocking. Kids do not speak like this ever! This book came out back when I was still considered an young adult. Nobody spoke like this back then. Nobody speaks like this ever. Who the fuck says suboptimal?
This fucking book is suboptimal!
(Don't tell me it didn't have that coming)
Final Impression
Well that was a colossal waste of my time. This 225 page book took me two fucking weeks to finish. Imagine. I could have read two good books in that time.
I hate it.
I fucking hate it.
That is all.
Comments