A Little Life

Now, I don't ever write reviews. Usually, I'm more than content to sit back in my chair and reduce a book to the number of stars I give it. Whatever my opinions on any particular book may be, someone's already probably written about it much more articulately than I could have ever hoped, and to a much larger audience, besides.

Sometimes, though, a book will incite such strong feelings in me that I don't feel like a one star rating would suffice. No, I have to sit down on my ass and ramble at the uncaring void of the internet, why, exactly it is that I absolutely, passionately, ardently despise a book.

Oh, man. This book. It's not that I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters or that the writing was absolutely horrendous–quite the contrary! The writing was gorgeous, and the characters–though they felt insufferable, at times–I grew to like. But, Jesus Christ, can anyone in this goddamn book catch a break? The first few times anything bad ever happened, I felt sad. And then bad things just kept happening. And happening. And happening. And happening.

Listen, I get tragedy. I get sad endings and bad things happening. However, when an entire book is literally just one gigantic sobfest piled on top of another sobfest, like it doesn't know how to evoke any other emotion in a reader other than absolute soul-crushing sadness, you really have to stop and think. What frustrates me most is that every now and then, I caught glimpses of something this book could have been. Something well and truly beautiful. But all of it was overshadowed by the ‘hey, let's make something bad happen to this character, again, for the sixtieth time, and make you feel bad.' Also, there's something to be said about how badly all of the gay characters here are treated but if I start on that I'm going to burst a vein or something, and I am not going to die over a book this bad.

Anyways, if tragedy porn is your thing, go ahead!