Reviews with content warning for Toxic friendship - Ett år av vila och avkoppling

The pacing is difficult to stick with and though an exercise in absurdism, I lost track of what it was the author was critiquing. The main character is the product of nepotism and privilege? Society? Capitalism?

Content Warnings

nhacco's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.75

I tried. I really did try to like this or to find in it something deep and layered. I tried to focus on the depression aspect of it, to connect and relate to the main character who is clearly depressed. But this book was really hard to get through. It’s short but it’s still too long. For the first half, it felt like the author just decided to see how many random stories that made no sense she could come up with, in order to impress you with how hot and thin and lacking in empathy the main character is. It’s really exhausting and zero percent interesting. If anything, it made me feel like her - bored and completely immune to feeling anything (while reading).
Then the second half is really just very long paragraphs of sentences and memories and imagery and thoughts the main character has, but it’s not the least bit interesting because this character is not interesting. Being edgy and mean and detached is not interesting. It felt mainly like the author just wanted an excuse to indulge her own thoughts and ideas, thinking they would be of any interest to anyone else.
And the story has no point. Just a

privileged girl that is bored with life so decides to give herself an addiction to sleeping pills to sleep for days at a time and black out and do things while out of it for months that she can’t remember (so we have no idea what happens) and then wakes up and feels like a normal person at last

. Extremely uninteresting and with no moral or point whatsoever. I thought this was going to be about a girl going on an eat pray love year lol

Content Warnings

ewicht830's review against another edition

Go to review page

fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

2.75

Content Warnings

krosebooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Majority of the book is kinda a sleep haze. The writing style is uniquely weird like a dream that doesn’t make any sense. She transforms her self harm into a form of meditation, letting her subconscious do the work.

The ending is amazingly dark and beautiful.

Content Warnings

kirtreads's review against another edition

Go to review page

reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I am not quite sure what all the hype is on this one. I spent the whole book waiting for anything interesting to happen and it really didn't. The ending of the book was a let down. The main character is insufferable, her best friend is also annoying. I get that this is supposed to be a look at the way that we deal with grief and trauma but it was just not doing it. The crazy psych was the best part about this book. This was just not it for me.

Content Warnings

roshnimc's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Very well written. The characters are not meant to be liked but are drawn so three-dimensional that we could identify them if we met them.

Content Warnings

More...