This may be my biggest pet peeve in literature – writing dialogue sans quotation marks. I’ve ranted about it time and time again, because it doesn’t make you edgy, it makes you exhausting. Plus this book felt like a more boring knockoff of The Girls, by Emma Cline, which I also hated. Mostly because of the cult stuff.
What happens is, I look over these lists of “best books of XYZ” and chuck them all on my hold list at the library because why not, forgetting the fundamental truth that I don’t like people or their opinions. Because whoever slapped this on a “best of” list is a g-d liar. Kwon takes that peeve of mine – the absence of quotation marks – and dials it up to eleven. These unformatted lines of dialogue INCLUDE MORE THAN ONE PERSON TALKING IN A LINE. HOW DO I KEEP TRACK OF WHO IS SAYING WHAT ESPECIALLY WHEN ALL YOUR CHARACTERS ARE EQUALLY DULL AND UNMEMORABLE.
This is not a good book. This is a book I finished so I could come here and rant about it. It’s told from a couple (I think three? Maybe just two) different perspectives about college kids who wind up a in a cult. A cult that seems to gravitate inexplicably from “let go of your worldly possessions (give them to us)” to “death to the baby killers” with like a what now? X did not lead to Y and the author isn’t cleverly playing chess with our expectations, she’s playing a drunken solo game of Twister and losing to herself.
I reviewed this last year and really didn’t like it. I luckily had the audiobook so I could more passively absorb. It did two things for me: 1) incense me every time I saw it on a “best of 2018” list and 2) convince me that there’s some level of pay-for-play going on in contemporary lit world right now. I think you gave it more stars than I did though.
Loved this review and totally feel you on the fact that you don’t like people or their opinions. I guess I’ll skip this one!
“This is a book I finished so I could come here and rant about it.”
Amen!!!!