Roisin
I just hated this book!
First of all, despite the attempts made, the story gets Iranian culture so wrong and I know some are used to using other people's culture and butchering them for their advantage but it really got on my nerve and affected my enjoyment of the story. A lot of things mentioned in the story are clearly specifics to one family or person who the story was modeled after and not actually facts about all Iranian but they were generalized anyway. (One thing was how the new years' tradition was totally butchered. Another thing was that the Iranian family acted like a slightly askew American family. The Farsi bits in the book also had a lot of mistakes. The characters talked like google translation instead of how actual Iranians talk. And more!)
Aside from that, the main character was extremely unpleasant. The way he handles the barely-there plot points that he comes across is so irritating. He was selfish and insensitive and constantly blamed everyone else for things he didn't have/know. He got upset when people spoke Farsi in Iran and he got upset if he wasn't the center of attention.
As for the writing style, it was so simple and bland. The main character used “um” and “uh” so many times I wanted to tear my eyes out. It definitely had a problem of telling instead of showing too. Darius constantly explained how “that made me sad” and it made me roll my eyes so many times it's a miracle I don't have an eye condition now.
I basically finished this book with great pain just because I suffered too hard not to give it a rating it deserved. Now I don't mean to say it didn't have any good to it but I think when you're writing about a culture and what you write will become an introduction to that culture for other people then you should take better care to not give wrong information.
I didn't enjoy reading this. The writing is good. It's just the characters that are horrible and while I do admire the achievement of writing such unpleasant characters, as I think everyone is always driven to write likable characters, it still does affect the enjoyment of the entire story.
It's like you spend more energy wishing you could strangle the characters than appreciate the prose!
The second half was also very anticlimactic. The story is trying to be character-driven instead of plot-driven but it's an adventure fantasy novel so it only sometimes works.
I'm going to read the sequels though. I've heard they get better.
PSA: The main character is kind of a misogynist. Not explicitly but it's enough to get annoying a bit. So if that's something that will ruin a book for you, be aware!
Brand new year, brand new reading goals!
So I finally read Call me by your name with the assistance of the audiobook read by Armie Hammer because I just couldn't resist!
I know, it might be a bit weird when I watch the movie now; what with him being the voice of Elio in my head but actually being Oliver but “call me by your name and I'll call you by mine” and all that!
It's a whole other level of meta there!
BOOM!
So anyway, getting into it. I really enjoyed reading this book. The tone of the book was my favorite thing about it. The lyrical, poetic tone makes the emotional stake of the story that much higher. By the time you reach the romance or whatever you want to call it, you already know the characters intimately and the investment in their lives is not just to see the love story.
I feel like I may have taken the romance a bit differently from what others did. Maybe not. For me the story was of more of a coming of age story, a story of sexual and emotional awakenings. Somehow the fact that the two of them would get to encapsulate their feelings and experience with each other was more important to me than to see them end up together.As we see in the story, they are no longer the exact people who went through that summer. So if they had stayed together, it would have morphed what they had found.
I feel like we go much more in-depth with the physical connection than the emotional or the intellectual connection. Even though we see Elio's pining for an extensive period of time, and we are told about their intellectual connection, due to the nature of the narrative which is told as a flashback of sorts, that part seems rather detached from the physical, actual relationship that Elio and Oliver have.
The feeling of their connection only sinks in after the fact and in unexpected conversations. Elio perhaps says it better than anyone else could:
While his entire life is separated into two sections of before Oliver and after Oliver, Elio still manages to have relationships that go far beyond what he had with Oliver.
But like a good work of art, like an artifact from a long gone civilization, what Oliver and Elio shared in those six weeks had come at such a pivotal point in Elio's life that it far surpassed any other experience. We later learn that perhaps this was also true to an extent for Oliver-though I'm not sure how much- and for me, that was what mattered: That what they had was preserved. That it was not forgotten
I thought I would cry at the end. But I didn't cry because I didn't see any reason to. The closest I came to crying was during Elio's conversation with his father which for me was the climax of the story. It was a heartwarming scene and it put the entire story of Elio and his Oliver in a nutshell.
The story is bittersweet. But it left me smiling because, with such an ethereal setting and such an unearthly romance, it's good to get grounded back to reality by knowing that the story didn't treat the events of the story as a childish game or a shock factor.
I was very worried that Oliver might die! I'm really glad that he didn't! I'm very sick of my gay ships sinking into the grave and such. It's good to see that even if things don't last, at least they had good lives after it was over. (seriously, why do you have to kill one of them off?! Just make them break up like normal people! Jesus!)
I haven't read Proust-you bet I am gonna, now! - but I've heard that it was his influence on the writer that shows in the poetic storytelling. I just loved it so much. It made the environment of the story that much more romantic and it created such a deep sense of serenity and laziness just as it's so often mentioned about the summer afternoons in the story. I just wanted to climb into the pages and live in B with the family and attend the dinner drudgeries! It also made me sad because I haven't seen Italy. It feels essential to fall in love in Italy at least once, now!
One of the most touching moments of the story comes after Elio has finally spent the night with Oliver for the first time and he spends the next day regretting it while simultaneously dismissing the experience. He brushes off the heated feelings he once had and mocks the fickleness of it all. Only to fall right back into Oliver's arms that night and every night after.
The beauty and honesty in this simple action is perhaps one of the many things the book gets right about love and lust and passion. The hopeless hope that maybe, just maybe, we would be content with having a taste once. That if we scratch the itch once it would go away and all the queasy feelings and heartaches would disappear. That feeling of cheating ourselves out of getting hurt. To assume that just maybe we are immune to the very thing that has haunted our dreams for weeks. Only to realize that getting the taste is just the beginning and you would go back again and again after the first time.
I highly recommend this book. Everyone should at least read about falling in love like this even if they don't get to experience it first hand!
Starting the year with a light romance, that is not actually called romance but what I now know is called “chick-lit” ;which by the way is a very sexist term! It was good enough! No hard feelings there. It's the perfect hangover book.hangover book: books you can read to get out of a book slump caused by reading very touching great books that you can't stop thinking about!
I was really debating between giving this 4 or 5. It's mostly 4.5 but I loved it sooo much I had to round it to five.
I was just reading this review and the writer said:”I only like books I can relate to the main character, but this book was more than that, I saw myself in the main character.” Well I can say with certainty that Blackmoore was THAR to me. I saw so much of my self, my pain and the feelings of being caged, the mythological and symbolized references. It was just my little piece of perfection. I felt the character in a way that I can't explain but feel deep in my heart. It was hauntingly beautiful.
The problem now: so this story is based at sometime around The Bronte/Austen time so the tone of the story should have been a bit more classical perhaps. So that was a huge problem and I didn't love it so much I probably should have given it a 4 just because of that. But I loved it so that does not matter! Also the character cried a little too much at the end. I cried a lot too but that's not the point! She shouldn't have!
The story needs some major credits. Because it has been ignored while it really should be praised. A story of tangled mysteries and deceits sat well together in an organized and thought-through plot. It is a very good sample for anti-bullying books-which I adore myself, since this issue does need more attention- but it's also good read for teenagers. The writing is compelling and you can pretty much get involved with the story. The main character is tangible and familiar and you can warm up to her quiet fast- and that's interesting because she is actually facing a character crisis. If I ever wanted to write a mystery book for the young adult genre, I would have wanted to be able to write like this.
The best book in the world ever!
Oh my goodness!How beautiful it was!I had almost forgotten how much I loved Fallen.
I both laughed and cried through the book.And(literally)felt my heart get squeezed. It was so good to finally understand the whole truth.I was almost afraid we would never get the whole story.
I should say it was the most well written book in the series so far.
Just loved it...don't know what else to say....