opheliapo's reviews
345 reviews

This collection was so void of insight that if you hadn’t seen one of the movies a poem was referencing it became totally nonsensical.
From the blurb, I was really hoping for an insight into the tropes that exist for women in horror, and how this might contrast to the real feelings and experiences that American women have. Instead I got a lot of poetic re-writing of scenes from the referenced movies (with no added perspective or insight), some half-hearted ‘you-go-girl’ sound bites that I think were supposed to be gritty, and a lot of modern poetic tropes that i’ve read a hundred times before. I swear if I have to read one more American feminist poem with the line ‘I contain multitudes / she contains universes / you contain galaxies’ I’m going to cry; well done, you used Tumblr in 2014 and you’ve read Whitman.

The heterosexuality is KILLING me.
I got about 20% of the way through without a single miss; I liked the pacing, the concept, the twists and turns. But then Tris starts acting like a Wattpad protagonist with her ‘i’m so ugly with my big blue eyes and petite body’, and the plot escalates so quickly that it throws the pace off entirely. Tris’s chemistry with Four is so halfhearted and the insults and bullying exchanged between the Dauntless trainees were as advanced as pee-pee-poo-poo preschool teasing.
By the end, nobody was particularly compelling and the plot had overextended itself too quickly.

Phenomenal. Outstanding. Flawless.

Uninteresting subject matter and cryptic for cryptic’s sake. Stellar rythme though.

The book grew on me, but I still feel it would have benefited from a little more empathy from the writer toward her characters, and a little less of an inauthentic ‘journalistic’ writing style.

Unsatisfying, but in a good way?

I don’t know what I went into this expecting but it sure as hell wasn’t that... I didn’t read this book I EXPERIENCED it.