carlin
sorry gay people but this was awful
hard to put into words how and why this was so bad. Maybe lets start with the characters, who are many but only of two dimensions. Elsie, our protagonist, feels almost completely passive. Her life falls apart seemingly just because, but not to worry as it will be rebuilt just as effortlessly. All of her friends and family are fonts of wisdom, brimming with therapy speak and good advice. People who are bad are evil and have no redeeming qualities.
Elsie is 29 and I think this story would've worked a lot better if everyone was at least 10 years younger. A lot of the sleeping around, crashing at friends places, doing poetry competitions, misunderstanding of feelings etc would've worked way better in a secondary school context, and the integration of the family into the story would've been a lot more natural.
Also, Elsie is a poet, and unfortunately the author is not (Edit: intended as a roast, but actually Little is not a poet, the poems were written by Kai-Isaiah Jamal). The poems in the book do get better, and rosewater is actually good thankfully, but the prose is either bad or plain and over-explained:
I’ve been writing poetry since I was eight years old and the consensus is that my writing bangs. I even won junior poet laureate a couple of years back and people printed one of my poems (about an imagined utopia in which straight things didn’t exist) on totes and T-shirts.
In terms of the LGBT/romance aspect, a couple of the sex scenes are at least well written, and I can imagine that Elsie could be relatable, but the actual romance is fairly weak and it makes sense that it sells itself as a "meditation" on romance rather than actually one
At least helpful for me for figuring out what I don't like in books, maybe in the future I can DNF something like this, if it's not for a book club
sorry gay people but this was awful
hard to put into words how and why this was so bad. Maybe lets start with the characters, who are many but only of two dimensions. Elsie, our protagonist, feels almost completely passive. Her life falls apart seemingly just because, but not to worry as it will be rebuilt just as effortlessly. All of her friends and family are fonts of wisdom, brimming with therapy speak and good advice. People who are bad are evil and have no redeeming qualities.
Elsie is 29 and I think this story would've worked a lot better if everyone was at least 10 years younger. A lot of the sleeping around, crashing at friends places, doing poetry competitions, misunderstanding of feelings etc would've worked way better in a secondary school context, and the integration of the family into the story would've been a lot more natural.
Also, Elsie is a poet, and unfortunately the author is not (Edit: intended as a roast, but actually Little is not a poet, the poems were written by Kai-Isaiah Jamal). The poems in the book do get better, and rosewater is actually good thankfully, but the prose is either bad or plain and over-explained:
I’ve been writing poetry since I was eight years old and the consensus is that my writing bangs. I even won junior poet laureate a couple of years back and people printed one of my poems (about an imagined utopia in which straight things didn’t exist) on totes and T-shirts.
In terms of the LGBT/romance aspect, a couple of the sex scenes are at least well written, and I can imagine that Elsie could be relatable, but the actual romance is fairly weak and it makes sense that it sells itself as a "meditation" on romance rather than actually one
At least helpful for me for figuring out what I don't like in books, maybe in the future I can DNF something like this, if it's not for a book club