Tell Me I'm Worthless

edit: I keep thinking about this book, and the more I think about it, the more I dislike it. In the end, it really was so juvenile, and worse, boring. I'm lowering my score to reflect my feelings on it, if 2 stars means “it was ok” it definitely doesn't deserve it in my eyes.

original review below

I found this book to be too ambitious for it's own good, tried to do too many things, didn't really do any of them, threw in a very stream of consciousness rant at the end, which I'm sure was intentional but reading it I couldn't help but feel like it was a cop out. Maybe if you throw everything in your mind at the wall, it will look like the resolution of a narrative. In general I found too many large sections in this already small book, to be of little substance.
The lack of subtlety, not an inherent fault nor something I expected out of a book that starts with stating it is about fascism, at times got to the point of being comedic. In the same chapter the TERF character mentions her discomfort with trans women in bathrooms not only are we told (otherwise irrelevantly) that a trans woman was in fact shitting next to her earlier, but she also gets sexually harassed by another woman.
Something I found odd, was the lack of tying the TERF movement more directly to other forms of the alt-right. In my experience a lot of terfs are bigoted in many other ways, and happy to throw in their lot with other alt-right, anti-lgbt, misogynist groups. But the terf women are portrayed surprisingly sympathetically all in all, they seem to at least, be well intentioned at some level. They're are liberal (“liberal”) women, academics, and the only one of importance besides the co-lead is a lesbian who almost assaults her (I assume based on a well known terf lesbian who also was alleged to do similiar). Of course those as portrayed in the book exists too but when the rest of the book deals with swastikas, and nazis, alt-right the omission feels strange. The closest to it is several mentions of how white the terf goup is. But perhaps this is just a side effect of the short length combined with trying to juggle too many topics.

Lastly, this book draws intentional comparisons between itself and The Haunting Of Hill House, Hill House is a short book.It manages to be complex in it themes and concise yet beautiful in it's language, but also subtle. This is none of those things, and it doesn't have to be, but Tthe multiple callbacks of to the opening paragraph of hill house (which I love!) are beat over the head , at first it's almost cute then it's just pointless.

“Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one of them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian, and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. . . . So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathise with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that. Are you a fucking idiot? Are you that fucking stupid that you genuinely think you can do that and that something like that is possible?”

Rating: 3.81 leaves out of 5Characters: 3/5 Cover: 5/5Story: 2.5/5Writing: 4.75/5Genre: Horror/LGBTType: AudiobookWorth?: I guess, depending on the personTW: Transphobia, Rape, Sexual assault, Antisemitism, Body horror, Sexual violence, Self harm, Racism, Gore, Hate crime, Suicide attempt, Homophobia, Dysphoria, Domestic abuse, Infertility, Animal cruelty, Pedophilia I would highly recommend you look at trigger warnings for this book! There are a lot more I didn't list! Hated Disliked It Was Okay Liked Loved FavoritedWant to thank Netgalley and publishers for giving me the chance to listen to this book. First book of 2023 and what a way to kick it off. Won't lie, it was an okay book. Nothing too grand and nothing horrible. I did take issues with one part and felt like it was just put in as a very poor excuse of an argument. I also feel like I get a look inside the mind of someone who is Trans and I think that is my favorite part about this. Because coming from someone who isn't you don't really know or understand what they go through inwardly, you only ever see it on the outside. How Alison expressed it was done pretty darn well. As for the horror aspect I really dug it. It gave monster house on a whole different level. There are some trippy scenes and the ending was chef kiss.

Evoked a very similar feeling to Red Pill by Hari Kunzru where I was couldn't look too close or linger too long for fear of recognizing myself in the text.
Doesn't quite stick the landing in the way Kunzru does. I also found myself wishing this book was just a little more subtle - I wanted it to let me make my own connections but I found it very prescriptive about it's own interpretation.

-I just finished this and I am at a loss for words. 
I think I liked this. I think that Rumfitt wrote something extremely strong, and the read is nauseating- at no point was I comfortable with what was happening to anyone or anything. I would read pages and need to put the book down and just think, and that does not happen to me very often. 
this starts as a horror story about two very broken people who had something terrible happen to them in a place where terrible things happen all the time, and it's also about fascism explicitly but despite that explicit almost manifesto-like theming rumfitt does not make you feel like you are just reading a manifesto with characters in it (and i don't think that kind of writing is bad, necessarily- and as someone who shares a lot of identities with some of the folks most hurt in this novel and who shares the political feelings, i'm not saying this from a place of “wah politics”) until the last two to three chapters. it becomes more explicitly a manifesto then, though certainly not fully.
and i don't know how i feel about it, or how i feel about the ending. i just simply do not know.
this is hard to read, emotionally. as someone who likes to read gore and body horror and fucked up shit (like Haunted by chuck palahniuk), i struggled with this. i think you should read it despite that, or maybe because of that. 
the chapter that turns into two separate stories told at once was super interesting, and i loved the change of format. the chapter before that where what happens to hannah is revealed toed very close to the line of “oh my g-d, okay, i get it,” but the writing is so... it's just so visceral i never quite got there. is that a good thing? who's to say.
i don't even know how i feel. i think i will have to come back to this.