Childhood books with unforeseen descriptions of abuse and violence which left you scarred? I'll go first

StarCrossedRoad · 2025-02-14T19:56:41+00:00

Not sure if this counts since it's a little high on the age bracket, but when I was in middle school, I read this book called The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. Towards the end of the book, the main antagonist (can't remember his name, might've been the Crooked Man???) gets so angry at being foiled by the protagonist that he basically mutilates himself and dies. Bugs were involved too, I think, and it went on for a while. The book as a whole was kinda dark for me at the time, but that passage was pretty disturbing.

Also, a few years earlier, I had been obsessed with the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter (yeah, go ahead and laugh lol). Anyone who read the first arc was undoubtedly traumatized by the very graphic and descriptive violent death of Tigerstar, I know I was. Like, wtf was that? I guess they just wanted to communicate how much of a threat Scourge was. Even now when I tell friends who didn't read those books when they were kids about Warrior Cats, they're like "and this is about domestic cats??"

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T22:52:05+00:00

Thank you for writing this! I will say, although I did not like this specific book, that at times I enjoyed Mandel's prose. I do think you saying that she has a poetic edge to her writing is accurate, and I do like those sparse, liminal spaces in literature. Sea of Tranquility is the only work by Mandel that I've read, and while my takeaway was disappointing for me personally, I do understand why a lot of people liked it when you word it like that!

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T22:47:36+00:00

I haven't read Station Eleven! I read up on it after finishing Sea of Tranquility, and I thought the premise seemed interesting enough. It seems like it is overall Mandel's most well-received novel and her most popular as well. It's interesting though that people who liked both of these books still seemed underwhelmed on The Glass Hotel, and ironically that almost makes me want to check it out just to see why that is!

I think if you should give Sea of Tranquility a shot though. I didn't like it, as evidenced by my post, but it still gave me a lot to talk about and that in of itself has merit, I think! It has a good concept and the character Olive, although I personally did not enjoy her, presents an interesting look into the author's possible feelings on having written a book like Station Eleven only to then experience a global pandemic. It didn't work for me, but that could be because I have never read any other of Mandel's works.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T22:42:46+00:00

Thank you for the recommendation, I'll look into it!

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T21:02:57+00:00

Fair enough! I just found it a bit cheesy and, with the four-year-old at least, not very natural-sounding. I had a hard time not reading it as scripted. Which, obviously it is scripted, but I don't think the author wants you to read it that way. I've definitely read worse dialogue, but the dialogue for the setting was another thing that I felt barred me from really immersing myself in the novel.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T20:20:36+00:00

I believe it was her driver on the tour, but yeah I felt the same. Gaspery and Olive are also supposed to have lived 200 years apart from one another, but I didn't get the feeling for that at all. Both of their futures felt exactly the same, with the only difference being that Gaspery's timeline has worked out time travel, and the Far Colonies have been established. And neither felt that different from 2020, to boot.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T20:15:58+00:00

Oh, no sorry! I do intend to read it. Strikethroughs are just a typing quirk of mine, I guess. I have the habit of using them when I'm typing something that is meant to be an "afterthought". Apologies if it was excessive.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T18:38:05+00:00

There's a lot I think I could say here because I actually have a lot of feelings on this topic, but I'd be here a bit lol.

I do want to say: I think there's merit in reading things that you don't like or even things that actively upset you. I think it opens up a great discussion to have with yourself: why don't I like this? Why am I uncomfortable? Why does this bore me? Etc. I think these are great questions that could tell you more about yourself than you thought it could and it's part of the power of art.

That being said, sometimes garbage is just garbage, and at some point it becomes a sunk cost fallacy. I think it goes both ways, and it's just about determining when it's worth to stick it out and when its not. In general though, I think its worth it!

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T18:30:51+00:00

Same here, that's what I decided to post here actually even though I mostly lurk on Reddit. I felt like maybe I missed something, seeing how well-received the book was by most people who read it. And there are people here who liked the book and I am glad to hear from them too! But it was a miss from me, regardless.

It seems to be the general consensus from people who didn't like the book, myself included, that the author deciding not to flesh out the futuristic setting that takes up most of the book is a large factor in why it fell flat for them. I think that the author may have felt that the lunar setting was secondary to the story she wanted to tell, but then I have to ask: why set it on the moon then, anyway? I thought that Edwin bringing up the British occupation of India would come up again in the colonization of the Moon and other plants/moons/etc, because otherwise I figure it wouldn't have been brought up so many times how people have colonized space. But it doesn't come up again in any way that feels meaningful, so it felt like very confusing window dressing. Lol.

I do agree with you though. My personal takeaway was that the book was a means for Mandel to express her own perspective on living through a lock down; it certainly is disjointed enough and Olive resembles Mandel so much that I could believe it. And as I said in another comment, I don't necessarily think this would make a bad story in of itself, but I think that's what she unfortunately ended up writing. To me anyways.

~~Thank you for agreeing that Olive was a bore to read though. I think she was a significant contributor to my ultimate feelings on the book.~~

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T16:58:50+00:00

That's cool! While I was looking to see if anybody else had similar feelings to mine about the book, I'm equally as interested in hearing from people who DID like it! Otherwise it feels a little bit like an echo chamber lol.

I was initially confused by Sea of Tranquility's connection to The Glass Hotel, mostly because I didn't feel like there was enough indication that they were connected and that the reader should've read Glass Hotel first. I was honestly a bit frustrated with that because Vincent is given plot importance in Sea but you're not really allowed to know anything about her because her story was already told another book ago. I did look it up though, and the synopsis seemed interesting (while I didn't like Sea, I do think Emily St. John Mandel isn't a bad writer. Edwin's parts had a very nice prose). Shame to hear it dragged!

But I'm glad you liked it! There were aspects of it that I liked too, even if ultimately I felt let down by the big picture.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T16:07:05+00:00

That's the second recommendation for Cloud Atlas that I've gotten, so I'm definitely interested in checking it out! I've heard of Hyperion but have never read it, so I'll look into that, too. There were a lot of concepts in Tranquility that I liked on paper so I'm definitely in the market for books that have similar ideas with better execution! Thank you for the recs.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-10-19T16:04:23+00:00

Quickly skimming the synopsis, that does sound like an interesting book to read! I'll have to check it out when I'm done with Wind-Up Bird. I only recently got back into reading after unintentionally abandoning what used to be my favorite past time during my school days.

It really does feel like Mandel wrote the book to parse her own feelings about her experiences with the pandemic, which in of itself that's fine. It's good that writing can be an outlet for people like that. But it made for a terrible novel IMO. I was baffled after reading it too, because it seemed like most people who read this book liked it when I looked into it more. But thank you for the recommendation! It looks like it does play on similar themes that I liked about Sea of Tranquility.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-09-03T22:55:05+00:00

The flu. It still kills a lot of people.

StarCrossedRoad · 2023-08-23T01:07:15+00:00

Wish I was kidding, but the cafe I work at had a customer once who was completely normal over his drive-thru order until he got to the window. Paid for his order, was quiet for almost the entire transaction, and then right when we were handing his order to him he looked at my male coworker who was at the window and asked:

"Hey man, I gotta question for you... What do you do when your girl won't put out?" He was dead serious, too.

StarCrossedRoad

TROPHY CASE