A Little Life

things i liked:
1. beautifully written
2. good representation

things i didn't like:
1. so much shit happened in Jude's childhood, maybe a little too much, made me a bit numb
2. plateaued a little in the middle of the book. while i understand it's meant to be more detail-oriented, it needed a little bit of more momentum from the story line.
3. i just wish Jude was a little bit less self-pitying
4. it felt a little feminine, maybe because it was written by a female author. she didn't understand the male psyche well enough (in my personal opinion)

This book's a real tearjerker! As other reviewers said though, in parts it might feel forced. I don't mind heavy subject matters, but this would have gotten 5 stars from me only if some of the heaviness was better balanced. E.g. maybe some of Jude's heavy struggles could've been replaced with another character's POV having more defined ups and downs.

I get that the point is to emphasise how isolated Jude feels with his big problems compared to his friends' 'normal' problems, but that concept didn't need to be taken to the extremes that it was. After a point it really was numbing and just piling on struggles didn't add to the emotional impact anymore.

Read this a couple months ago and just had to get through the last couple tens of pages. The book is...a lot; you have four characters, and in the beginning it feels confusing because you can't keep track of all of them. Eventually, you keep focus on two of them, while one has episodic appearances and the other one is literally there just to design the others' apartments; I would've loved to see Malcom join the others a lot more, because otherwise this feels like a three friends and another person scenario rather than the four friends that share a deep bond type thing that the synopsis indicated. I've honestly picked up this book because I have heard many individuals talk about how this book made them bawl so hard, so I had to check it out. While the few chapters that talk about Jude's past experiences are considerably graphic and can be triggering to some individuals, I can't but feel that the author has diluted the level of seriousness that the scenes should have had; throughout the book, all the characters want to know things about Jude's past and it is always described as something horrific and gruesome, and as such, you have this sensation that the author couldn't control themselves to keep the twist and secret for the end and left little bits across the book to sort of keep you involved.
Leaving that aside, the book is realistic; the characters are vivid and their relationships are similar to those that adults have in real life. The progression is believable, and the book correctly describes how one should act and behave with a friend that has a troubled past. It might be just the fact that I have read them after a couple of months and while I was reading something completely different, but the last twenty pages really saved the book and brought it from questionably mediocre to a decent contemporary novel.