opheliapo's reviews
345 reviews

I connect spiritually with Stinky.

There were moments within this book where I experienced the same thrills I had watching Killing Eve, and though I have to give Jennings credit for creating the characters of Eve and Villanelle, his shaping of them didn’t hold up to Waller-Bridge’s adaptation.

This collection felt like it meant a lot to Fiona Sampson but she put little effort into sharing those feelings with the reader. As vague and disconnected from itself as the last time I read it, but I did still enjoy ‘THE CHANGES’.

I should take this as a lesson not to read books just because they’re popular. This wasn’t bad per se, but it really wasn’t my cup of tea, and if it had been any longer I would have DNF’d.

This is my first Karin Slaughter, and having heard raving reviews of her works, I was a little disappointed. I didn’t really root for any of the primary characters, I wasn’t astonished or disgusted by the villain/s, and the plot was just a little too unlikely for me to feel satisfied at the end. I will probably give one of her more popular works a go at some point, but i’m in no rush.

An amalgamation of all the bits of Normal People I didn’t care for.

Although I agreed with most of what Robin DiAngelo said (minus a few pretty broad statements about human behaviour in chapter 8), i’m left uncertain about who the intended audience was for this book. As someone interested in, but by no means an expert on, race relations in the US, I didn’t read anything in this book that I haven’t read before, and I don’t feel that it added much to the current conversation. If, as I suspect, the book was aimed at ‘liberal, middle class white Americans who ‘don’t see colour” then the combative title and underhandedly patronising tone of the first chapter of this book seems counterproductive.
Although most of DiAngelo’s points are sound, she takes on the character, particularly toward the end of the book, of the ‘good white person’, leading the blind and uninitiated white people to better race relations and more humility, which is a little saccharine at times.
I would have liked to see more focus on the psychology behind racist behaviour over the examples from personal experience that she gives, and I would have been interested in a more in-depth approach to her sociological research.

I was so intrigued, I full on gasped at the first twist (I also said ‘how didn’t I guess that?’ out loud to an empty room), but the follow-up and conclusion really didn’t live up to the expectations of the original intrigue).