Daniel
I hated this book. I read this to learn something about women psychology that I thought could be useful in appreciating women, instead my takeaway is that the author is a femme-nazi with modern day twisted thinking (despite the book being two decades old). It feels like it's a whole book of “man's fault” for women having issues.
What's so easy about being a man? It's not really a glorious existence either if you start to look close. Stop blaming, and start changing yourself from inside. Sounds like this woman has serious issues... she should go see someone.
The main premise of the book has some serious flaws around it which is why I'm giving it two stars. Miguel keeps restating that people should see themselves as perfect and complete. He gives an example where he himself is perfect, but needs to be healthier. The idea of seeing yourself as perfect is to allow yourself to unconditionally love yourself, because you're already perfect.
The issue I have here is that this is delusional. No one is perfect, and the book should be teaching to love yourself DESPITE imperfections. How can someone be perfect if they need to be more healthy as his own case?
A perfect person, thing, or being is one that does not need improvement. If people listen to his guidance literally, then people would stop thinking about how to better themselves, as perfection has been reached already.
While you may think this is a technicality, it isn't. The wrong message will still get imprinted on people. An honest message is to teach people to love themselves despite being imperfect, but maybe that's more difficult to write about.
If anything should be made mandatory reading in schools in hope to saving us, then this is it. His insights and being able to tackle trickle issues with eloquent language and clearly well studied and thought out concerns is thought provoking to say the least. If you read this book, and find nothing challenging about the points he makes, and the contradictions in todays identity politics, then I have to wonder how you ended up in that place. It's got to be pretty dark.
I learned some things about myself while reading this book, and every time I can learn something about myself when I read a book, that's a huge win. While it is repetitive at times, this book is no more so than any other typical self-help book. I recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand themselves more, and the opposite sex.
This is a story narrated by death featuring a girl, a jew, an accordion player, and a boy with yellow hair. It's a well written story, a very well written story. What I wish was that the ending didn't feel so rushed. What I wish was that the story told me where it would take me, with a purpose and a goal. If you like Neil Gaiman, then the author's writing is similar, but better.
Like all books by Greene, it is unfortunately filled with anecdotal evidence as opposed to scientific research. What made this book worse than others was that many of the anecdotal evidence wasn't even that, but it was based on fictional characters in books and plays. However as usual, it's interesting and well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
Two stars! That's crazy you say? Is it really? I don't know, perhaps it's just me. I have my reasons of course.
Let me first say what I think she did well. I think she picked an interesting premise. Having children who have gone to other worlds, Alice in Wonderland style, opens up a lot of possibilities. Her prose is quite good.
As far as the things I didn't like, here we go.
Protagonist:
Nancy is our main character, but she doesn't really do anything, or add anything to the story that supporting characters don't do by themselves. All she wants to do is go back. We find out about her sexual orientation, and god knows why, because it doesn't play much of a part in the book.
Antagonist:
We don't find out much about the antagonist. It's a character that's more or less just in and out in a flash. There's no mystery behind this character. There's no build up.
Contradictions: There are several contradictory statements in the book. I'll mention three here, but there were more, and I got lazy to write them down.
1. Nancy says early on that she expected other girls to be a certain way about the places they went to, but in the same chapter it was clear she had no idea there were other travelers like her
2. Don't have hope you'll ever go back is an early theme, but when Nancy asks how many have gone back the answer is... We don't know. But some people go back. Eleanor knows or three. Later it's obvious it happens a lot.
3. “There a reason you were all pulled in to worlds that suited you so well” is a general statement Elenor makes about the children and their worlds. However, if you look at the second school where the children want to forget, and some of the children having bad experiences in their world; not everyone was suited well for their worlds.
Character development:
Very minimal. I didn't feel close to any of the characters. There wasn't much build-up so when they get killed, so ? I didn't care.
Main plot and resolution:
Given the premise of the book, she could have had so much more fun with the main plot than what she did. OK, someone goes wild and starts slaying the kids. But it feels very abrupt. And so does the ending. Nancy stands still, sees the killer, and by the time she tells anyone, they already were in a position to know. So again, what's Nancy good for? She could have done something to work out who the killer was. Nope. She and another character saw it, and the other character was already in a position to say who.
Conclusion:
I'm puzzled why this book got so many awards. Good for Seanan I guess. It gives me hope I can churn out something pretty shallow and get fame and fortune too. So... good for me too.
well written, but several times I found it was annoying. She squeezed her own opinion in some places where it wasn't even relevant. Example, the refugee crises didn't have anything to do with the rest of the book, and was just thrown in there. If you are planning to get the audiobook, know that she's narrating, and she sounds like she wants to die when she's reading it. Maybe she was forced to read it at gunpoint, it's not entirely sure. I don't exactly see how the title makes sense either. It wasn't Trump who broke democracy. He hired CA for which she worked, and THEY had unethical business practices. Anyone would have hired them, and simply assumed they were operating legally because that's THEIR business. There's really a lot of fluff in the book. I'm torn between 3/4 stars because it's well put together. Despite her droning voice, it largely kept my interest, but as any memoir it's mostly personal perspective so there's not much you can use in here. The amount of talk about bitcoin seems to have an agenda, and it's mentioned far too much for just relevance to the story. It feels like it's injected for that agenda.
Shot, concise and filled with excellent advice. It would be great to have a friend like Tynan. I think he's extra relatable because I'm a programmer and he's really dissected what friendship means, going deep into the data. Who doesn't love that?
(Tynan, if you ever read this, thanks. I'd send you an email, but I don't want to bother you since you get so much).