Apart from the last chapter, which I think really carried this book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a pretty straitghtforward read. Not bad by any meansApart from the last chapter, which I think really carried this book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a pretty straitghtforward read. Not bad by any means, but it didn't blow me away either.
Merged review:
Apart from the last chapter, which I think really carried this book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a pretty straitghtforward read. Not bad by any means, but it didn't blow me away either....more
first half of this was so good and enjoyable (banter, fun writing, great character dynamics), and then the third act conflict hit and ruined ev...sigh
first half of this was so good and enjoyable (banter, fun writing, great character dynamics), and then the third act conflict hit and ruined everything. this book just really loses momentum once the two characters get together, and then it's like treading water until we hit the dreaded third act conflict, which really strained credulity. the problem in this case is that the characters' conflicts are so defined and obvious, like something straight out of a novel outline (Alison's conflict will be that she's Forcing Herself to Be Adventurous, and Adam's will be that he's Not Bold Enough to Progress in His Life). and you can tell that these conflicts lack complexity because they become increasingly repetitive throughout the story, with characters just saying the same things in slightly different ways. the last third of this was such a disappointment for me--it's like the book built me up in the beginning just to sorely let me down in the end ...more
super readable, but as a story this felt incomplete. i didnt really buy the slowburn romance--partly because i found Grimm to be a very inscrutable chsuper readable, but as a story this felt incomplete. i didnt really buy the slowburn romance--partly because i found Grimm to be a very inscrutable character, and partly because i wasnt feeling any tension whatsoever between these characters (slowburn only works if there is, in fact, a "burn")--and i didnt like how this ended so abruptly. it felt like a one-book story that was split into two books just for the sake of it. but the writing really is great. a lot of the debuts i read feel like theyre trying too hard, but the writing in this one strikes the perfect balance between earnest and funny. too bad the story and the character work didnt follow suit......more
"Isla had picked at the cuticle of her thumb with her ring finger and nodded dumbly along with this, tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wa
"Isla had picked at the cuticle of her thumb with her ring finger and nodded dumbly along with this, tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wanted to quote to a patient earlier in the week, about Old Masters and suffering: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The point, of course, being the whole bright dailiness of agony, the way Icarus in the Bruegel painting could crash to earth as little but a background detail while the bland spool of life went on in the foreground; the ploughman at his plough and the fabric of the day untouched, uninterrupted."
Private Rites is, to me, a novel about the question of the everyday within the disastrous. That is, how do we continue to live our everyday lives while in the midst of an ongoing disaster? How can something that is catastrophic, life-altering on a global scale, become subsumed into, or sit alongside, everyday life?
Wherever you are in Private Rites, you are, just like the characters, forced to reckon with the inexorable, immovable, undeniable reality of its central disaster: it will not stop raining. There is rain everywhere, water everywhere, whole cities flooded, their infrastructure long gone. This is the world the characters of the novel must live in, and what makes the novel so compelling, I think, is that simple fact: that they need to continue to live in it, despite the fact that it is slowly becoming uninhabitable. I think sometimes the tendency with these dystopian settings is to Provide Commentary on a disaster, to explain it by pointing to any number of factors (Capitalism, Technology, Oligarchy, etc.), but it can be so much harder to just have your characters live in it, to suffer its daily degradations and deprivations--to experience, day by day, the gradual worsening of an already bad situation, and to have to live through it anyway, because what other choice is there? Despite everything, there is still an everyday to be gotten through: groceries, jobs, commutes, meals, family. (Though--and the novel is very aware of this--the characters are very privileged to even have this semblance of an everyday life.)
But as much as Private Rites is a climate disaster novel, it's also very much a family drama novel. We have three sisters--Isla, Irene, and Agnes--and an abusive father who, we find out on page one, has just died. From there, the sisters are forced to come together and reckon with how their father's abuse has affected--and continues to affect--not just their own selves, but also their fraught relationships with each other. There are, of course, the material realities of the novel's climate disaster, but I think water is, in a way, also an apt motif for a book whose characters have absorbed these ways of being from their childhoods--been steeped in that abuse such that now, as adults, its traumatic aftereffects seep into their adult lives and relationships. And seep they do: Armfield doesn't give us any big flashbacks to illuminate this past, but rather flashes of memory that constantly intrude on the sisters when they're alone and together. We don't get the full picture, but we get bits and pieces of it, and the effect is all the more powerful for this restraint.
Climate disaster + childhood trauma--Private Rites seems maybe like an unrelentingly bleak novel, but it's really not. It's not an upbeat novel by any means, but despite the bleak circumstances, it never feels one-note. The characters are fleshed out, shown to us in both their worst and most vulnerable moments; and even as the novel's climate disaster rages on, its characters still manage to have faith, even if just a little, in something--be it a person, a relationship, an act, a belief.
Private Rites is definitely (and unexpectedly) one of my favourite reads of the year, and such a different novel from Armfield's debut: longer, more ambitious, and, I think, ultimately more satisfying.
did i like this? sure, but idk it felt kind of...cobbled together. the plot is mostly just whatever--its not a super complex plot and yet it somehow cdid i like this? sure, but idk it felt kind of...cobbled together. the plot is mostly just whatever--its not a super complex plot and yet it somehow came across as convoluted--and the romance itself was enjoyable but forgettable. altogether this was a bit bland, a bit flimsy, nice in the moment but a story where ultimately nothing much stood out to me. (tbh the cover has more intrigue and tension than the actual book...)
generally liked this but i felt like the character arcs were underdeveloped (especially considering how long this book is) and ultimately unsatisfyinggenerally liked this but i felt like the character arcs were underdeveloped (especially considering how long this book is) and ultimately unsatisfying
sorry but this read like a dollar-store version of Happy Place by Emily Henry. like Happy Place except without any of the charm, the character, the tesorry but this read like a dollar-store version of Happy Place by Emily Henry. like Happy Place except without any of the charm, the character, the tension, the fun banter, etc etc etc
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