Hannah
2.5/5
there's potential here..!!! autism in such a highly conformative culture like japan feels like such an interesting concept to tackle but the author flubs it and the story ultimately goes nowhere.
mary oliver's poems always feel like warm hugs. my favourite cottagecore poet
whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
bad. sorry! sloppy, simplistic, overly expositional writing style, with really bland takes about race and sexuality that honestly made me google the author out of curiosity because I was like “I bet she's a straight white woman”. Spoiler she's a straight white woman.
3.5/5
my favourite parts were when he went on multiple-page dissections on the concept of a joke and how to properly make one to adequately amuse people, while simultaneously fumbling the bag time and time again with ms kenton. autistic king
can they please release a new audiobook version with a different narrator for wylan because it was borderline unlistenable especially the parts where he did kaz's voice PLEASE
minus a star cause I wanted it to go deeper!! a good primer on the disease for people who know nothing about it (me) and a general good read for people who love banger sentences dunking on capitalism (also me)
read the audiobook narrated by rob reiner so all the characters had bronx accents. highly recommend.
really scratched the YA dystopian novel itch in my brain that I haven't felt since high school!!
this book is a european man's idea of whimsy. what i mean by that is that there is an underlying layer of bigotry across everything, thin enough to ignore for the first few instances but physically grating when being subject to it for 300+ pages (or 9 hours in my case). like a swedish coworker who's friendly and has interesting stories to tell, but who eventually says something that's misogynistic or racist and makes you remember ah yes, this is a white man who has never had to think about being anything else but a white man.
i could go on and on about the things i didn't like about this book but here are some of the most egregious:
1. for some reason the author can't go 2 sentences without describing how overweight a certain character is whenever he's in a scene. Like long gratuitous descriptions of how his“rolls of fat” wobbled every time he talked or moved.
2. in the audiobook, the narrator gives a half-white, half-Iranian child a thick middle eastern accent, even though he is born and raised in sweden. i can't find any reason for this choice other than to otherize non-whiteness. this coupled with the mom of the child always being called the “foreign woman” is like microaggression central.
3. all the women in this book are like perfect manic pixie dream girls who are insanely nice to ove for some reason. especially sonja. what do you mean she married him because no one else would ride the train for so long to be with her?? what do you mean she read shakespeare to special needs kids?? can you be more on the nose please
4. there's a part in which ove and his friend plant drugs in the house of rowdy teenagers and get them arrested and evicted from their neighborhood. it's meant to be like a funny bonding moment for the two men. what?! first of all, these kids' lives are now ruined. second of all, fuck your HOA. third, ACAB!!! i realized at this point that none of these issues are ones that affluent white european men ever have to think about. and then i got mad. and then i still had 2 hours left in my audiobook!!
i don't have an issue with ove being a character of questionable values and opinions. i wouldn't be so one-dimensional to expect that a protagonist's morals align with my own. my issue is with the author. i don't know what i was looking for when i started this book, but i finished it being more exhausted of white male perspectives than I had been in the recent past.
(and it also further proved my point that goodreads ratings can't be trusted.)
