peeled_grape's reviews
134 reviews

I have a soft spot for satires, and this is the best one I've read. I love its Tralfamadorian subplot and the ways Vonnegut has made it relevant to the main plot. I love the leaps through time. I love how observant it is, which you can see on a micro level. In all, it is beautiful, and deeply satisfying. It manages to avoid any sort of preachiness, which is hard to do in a satire, without compromising its critique. Sometimes, satires also lose its story while trying to make a point, which also isn't an issue with Vonnegut. It is honest and moving and deceptively simple. This has made it into my all-time favorites list.

This book came at the recommendation of my younger brother, and it surprised me. A lot. For the most part, it was your typical YA book, and I think the general premise of it is unrealistic. It took me two tries to get past the beginning, where everything is getting set up. The last third of this book, though, is incredible. More specifically, I'm thinking of one chapter/section near the end which goes into more depth of the "unwinding" process, and I read the entire thing with my hand over my mouth. Then, of course, I tore through the rest of the book, which is what everything was leading to, and it was great. I think about that one section regularly, though, and I admire it quite a bit.

There is nothing new and original about this book. I wasn't fond of any part of it. The narrator is advertised to be unreliable, but because she ends up being right about everything in the end and recognizes anything that distorts her perceptions, I would argue that she's actually pretty reliable? Even the things that would make her unreliable aren't original at ALL. And I don't like her. The narrator was in no way likable or enjoyable. The end of the book felt like cheating, and it was dissatisfying.

On a less serious note, the journalist in me thinks that no one should be able to use this many semicolons and get away with it. Also, in case you didn't know, A.J. Finn is actually Dan Mallory, and if I knew that before I got the book, I wouldn't have bought it at all. I would actually recommend staying away from this book, both because neither the author nor the book are good.

Why did this become a classic? I'm confused why this book even exists. I have so many issues with it. The book's central theme of being opposed to the censorship of knowledge is fantastic, but Bradbury says this while meaning something else. I don't know anything about Ray Bradbury, but I can 100% guarantee that he'd be the kind of guy that thinks his First Amendment rights are being infringed upon because he can't say racist shit, the kind of guy that thinks that the generations younger than him are "too sensitive" because they call him out on it. He'd be the old guy who goes on a Facebook rant about how cell phones are ruining society. This whole book runs on these ideas. Even if I did agree with what he was saying, the points he's trying to make are weak and ineffective. They're too broad and too disconnected to make coherent sense. There is no worldbuilding, the plot is a mess, and the characters are indismissably inconsistent. The irony here is that every plot move and character shift is for instant gratification--it looks cool, but it's empty. This book deserves the biggest "ok, boomer" and none of the attention it's gotten.

Hmm. A lot of these stories are stunning, though you have to be okay with being confused with a lot of this, I think. Part One was my favorite of the three, which is strange because I tend to like stories more like those in Part Three. Many of the stories in this section seem to end right before the protagonist comes to an understanding of something. It's like the moment the story has been leading to is left just barely outside the story. What makes this writing so incredible is I still found the stories complete and satisfying. I may not have understood everything, but I also felt like I wasn't supposed to immediately get the purpose of the stories or even where they were leading.

What I didn't like: I am so tired of reading stories of girls with "daddy issues" or girls in pain who try to solve all their problems with sex. It's fine if you're using these stereotypes to mess with them or change them somehow, but this just reinforced it. This was so present in these stories. I also wasn't cheering for some of the protagonists some of the stories seemed to want me to, and that, at times, dulled what these stories could have been.

I super liked the form of this. There isn't much of a plot -- it just kind of cuts between different events in different points of time -- but there is still some kind of tension. I think it's because we know there's this big, bad event waiting for us at the end (

and man, that ending is heartbreaking

). It also doesn't like to get deep into any character's mind, but this removal is thematically fitting, and I found that harmony satisfying. There is also so much white space, which is also thematically fitting.

I mean, Julio doesn't even find out that Emilia is dead for a year (or a year and a half! I love this detail!) later. We don't even get to know why she committed suicide. She's just dead, suddenly, and it's treated so commonly that it doesn't feel like this big thing, which both makes sense and doesn't make sense all at once. It's satisfying, though. The white space! The passage of years! The not-knowing! It all just fits.

I'm so disappointed to hear this became a movie. Filling in all the details and making things concrete takes away so much of the magic of this piece. The white space and the unsureness of the narrator add to the story so much. Super fast, super easy read. It's deceptively simple.

A disclaimer: I'm not a huge sci-fi or romance fan, nor am I a fan of things set in the past. Those are all major elements in "Mem."

It's not that I didn't like this book -- I just never really engaged with this book. The concepts it presents and the questions it poses just aren't ones I really care about. It reads a little like YA fiction. Again, not bad, but in reading this, I didn't get anything new out of it.

I do like that it was about memory and the story was split between the past in the present (which is exactly what memories are). It's thematically fitting. The protagonist is likeable and, unlike most YA (or near-YA novels), she is completely functional and autonomous. Fantastic.

I don't know. It just wasn't anything new and exciting for me.

My brutally honest review: I hated this book. I disagreed deeply with the narrative it was pushing. I hate this "you should be loyal to your family just because they're your family" message. I hated that this was the view she conceded to, even though the book details a number of messed up things about the way she was raised. I hate that this was what won out. I hated how passive the protagonist was. I hated how the whole book praised her passiveness like it is some noble conclusion. There is this victim-blaming undertone, an “everything will be alright if you just remember the positive things and look on the bright side” subtext. I HATE it. As someone who had to work really hard for her anger, I am pissed that this book creates a narrative that would try to undermine that work. Reading this was entirely unpleasant in the wrong ways, and I spent quite a bit of time just fuming. On the other hand: it is well-written, albeit too long and a bit boring at times. Most of my hatred toward this is its rhetorical message.