Sabrina
Lived and studied there for 14 years out of the 18 years of my young life before I ‘escaped'. None of what was written surprised me or seemed far fetched. As a woman, especially a young girl, we were repressed and undermined every step of the way. Funny thing is, we are not a religious family and yet my dad had to conform to societies expectation of its women. Obscene flaunting of wealth by the rich while there were so many starving poorer families around. But this is not about me, it's about Sultana. I think the book is well written but I find it hard to feel sorry for Sultana with her four palaces and all those servants while she cries poor me. Take the wealth away and then undergo being a woman in Saudi and you'll know what its really like. I'm grateful for the land for giving my dad the opportunity to work there for 22 years but man, it wasn't the most pleasant childhood.
A lot of the big readers I follow haven't rated this book very highly so I was a bit reluctant to buy it but man I'm glad that I did. I must not have very sophisticated taste in books because I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
What a journey.
Yes the ending is predictable and I saw it a mile away but it's the journey that matters. Highly recommend!
It's very hard to review a book with such an appalling true story premise as people often jump to the conclusion that you are undermining the horror that these people went through, that I'd never understand, that we should never judge. I'm sorry, I'm not judging but if you choose to portray your life to the world, you need to expect the criticism.
This book was not well written at all. It was repetitive, almost child like in its narration and cold. I could not connect with a single character. Maybe this was intentional, some psychological side effect, i don't know. To be honest, I also finished reading the book and kinda blamed all the girls as well for all the horrors on those 3 or 4 (pretty sure Mac was killed too) people. While I do not know what that sort of trauma would do to me if i was in that situation, this debilitating fear of the mother is pretty ridiculous. To dob on your cousin when you know what your mother is capable of? That's just cruel and probably fueled the boy's early demise. And to say ‘oh I don't know why I did that, i just... Did' what the hell?
I don't know, i finished the book because I started it but I would never recommend it.
I read this book purely out of internet pressure to read it: it's on every freaking list out there. Man, it was a drag. It was pointless. I was enjoying it till he starts reading the Goldstein book in the book and it nearly put me to sleep. I feel for Winston because he peeks through a little bit of normalcy in his inner thoughts but man, this was not a good dystopian book.
There's very few books in the world in my life that I have not enjoyed. Unfortunately, this goes in that limited list. It may have been the translation or it may have been the writing, I don't know, I just did not... Feel for the situation. Don't get me wrong, it's an immensely traumatic experience to go through and no one should ever have to however the entire book felt very disjointed. I didn't connect with the writer at all. I won't be reading the rest of his novels, unfortunately.
Man, this book started out rough as guts (Hello, Rory). What. A. Book. I have only read one other Zusak book and that was The Book Thief of course, but this was next level.
The only way I can describe my experience reading Bridge of Clay in two days is that it read to you in waves. You don't read the book, it reads to you. You think you understand, you think you know the stories, you think you know Matthew and Clay and Penny and Michael but you don't, till you read the next chapter and the next and the next.
It's beautifully poignant, it's a sad, sad love. It's a love story, it's many tales of love. Zusak is a master story teller. He spun these beautiful tales of these beautiful characters through a source you would not expect and it reads the same.
Considering I started the book, read a chapter and didn't read for couple of weeks, my tears in the end were well earned.
I read this because I watched the movie couple of years ago and also because I visited Cambodia this year. The movie stayed with me a long, long time and I applaud Angelina for getting the essence of the book and representing it so well in cinematic form.
The book and the story is haunting, to say the least, but I wasn't particularly a fan of how it was written. This is meant to be a 5 year old little girl at the start but all I could hear was the adult voice. If it was written as a flashback in the perspective of Loung, it would have been a bit more... Adaptable.
Nevertheless, I commend the author for voicing her story. For someone so resiliently quiet about her emotions, it must have taken a lot to relive through this and that's something I'll always admire.
I just finished this on the back of The Tattoist of Auschwitz and it's been an... interesting read. While I found the tone of both books the same despite it being two extreme sides of the story, the complacency in The Tattoist was a lot more understandable than in The Reader. I found the authors philosophical ramblings unbearable considering he didn't partake in any of the actual trauma inducing history that his father or Hanna went through.
All he did was stuff his German weiner when he was 15 and then sooked about not getting his way the rest of his life with Hanna because she had the upper hand and left. If the roles were reversed and if he had ended up leaving her for Sophie, for example, there wouldn't have been a novel or a life long complaint.
To be honest, I liked the movie a lot more and a bit disappointed that I spent money on the book.
This was such a hard book to start reading but like all horror reads, you adjust to all the depravity, inhumane acts that was done by one human being to the other. I found the tone of the book very puzzling, like Lole was an unfeeling outsider the entire time but reading what his son wrote at the end put some perspective to why the book was dictated the way it was.
I have a sick fascination with the second world war and reading this book, on a bus, in a another horror filled country like Cambodia, a day after visiting the genocide museum touched a very raw nerve.
I don't particularly find profiting from these horrors very tasteful, the Killing Fields left such a bad taste in my mouth and I didn't take a single picture. This is true wether it's war memorial entrance fees, movies or books. However I also understand the need for people to tell their story, to showcase what they went through and to find closure.
Finishing this book reminded me of why I don't read Stephen King books anymore. Mind you, I have read most of his books when I was younger but it's also the reason why I stopped in my twenties. Here I was thinking at the start that it's going to be different to his usual, a good old thriller with a murder but no such luck. It had its usual Stephen King ending.
I loved this book. That's the long and short of it. I loved how Jodi Picoult had written it and how she didn't shy away from a very tough subject.
There's a lot of negativity and hate around Small Great Things and directed towards Jodi Picoult personally, especially in reviews, and I think despite how strongly hate came across in the book, people are still hell bent on doing just that.
Who cares if she's white or black or an alien? Isn't the whole point of the book not to judge? And everyone screams injustice after a reading a book about being kind to one another. So she wrote a book about a minority and it may not have come across as authentically minor as it should have, doesn't putting your nose up about it the same as saying #alllivesmatter?
I'm a south asian girl born into a Muslim family living in Australia married to a Caucasian. Do you think any author can capture everything that a girl like me has been through? No. So should all authors stick to writing about things thats familiar to them? White about whites, asian about asians and black about blacks. Everyone in their neat little compartments. Man, George R R Martin and Stephen King will run out of ideas real quick then. And there will be no fiction in the world, just biographies and history books.
I don't know man. Everyone has an opinion and everyone is entitled to one. Fair point. But some of the hate coming out in people's comments about someone's fictional creative work, targetting an author personally, makes Turk look like a saint. I have read a lot of reviews since reading the book and while I stand by my love for it, I think I'm happy being in my hermit world than reading other people's opinions in the reviews section .
Real life is far more scarier, it seems Ms Picoult than your work of fiction.
Oh wow. What a roller-coaster read this was. I was on the edge of my proverbial seat the entire time. I was with Eleanor through the whole episode, ups and downs and everything. Shirley Jackson does wonders with words and it's definitely exemplified in how her readers feel at the end of the book. I read this after watching the series and while I thought the series was the best I had seen in a long time, this read was even better. Also, small truth, I slept under the blanker on a 40 degree night after reading the first half of this book 😉
Oh my, what can I say? Khaled Hosseini had me wrapped around his talented little fingers again. I finished this in record time, much like his other books. The intertwining lives was a fascinating puzzle and I hungered for each chapter to learn more. I sometimes started a new chapter wondering why we needed to know this persons perspective but towards the end, you would have built yet another connection with yet another character. Some aspects struck too close to home, like he has with all his other books, this I reckon would be true for a lot of Asian muslim girls. Highly highly recommend.