The Centre

Enjoyed this world, it cleanly and visually builds - I can see this translating well onto film or TV. The protagonist has a fresh, accessible, thoughtful, aware and self deprecating contemporary voice which lends well to keeping the mixed controversial themes on the table in a conversational sense without it turning it heavy . My irk was that I felt it was a great set up to another novel (I went to an evening with the author and she has no plans to write another sadly) - I felt it offered a lot of exciting possibilities.

I enjoyed this one a lot. It covers a lot of topics but it never feels forced. The writing style was beautiful, the pacing was steady, the relationships between the characters and their evolution felt real. It's aggressively unpretentious and that's perhaps the thing that surprised me the most about it. Its cleareyed celebration of friendship between women was also absolutely delightful. It's not the most action packed book but it's a good book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gillian Flynn Books for giving me early access to this audiobook for review.

This was a wild one for sure, and it may need a second reading for me to really grasp the whole thing. There are many things however that it says about womanhood and being a woman of colour that felt very really and struck a cord with me.

Also as a linguistics major I absolutely adored how this book looked at and talked about language, how it relates to us and our culture as well as how these things make us who we are.

It is a bit of a think piece and there is a lot of nothing that does seem to happen with my interest in languages and my love of reading about different POC it was enjoyable but I think it might not be for everyone.

I do think that once it comes out I may give it another read as I imagine this is the type of book that benefits from multiple reads.

I think I'll need to sit with this book for a while to really understand how I felt about it, but here's my gut reaction:

I didn't know much about this book before reading it — I'd kept deferring my Libby hold for months, and so I had forgotten where I heard about it and what it was about. I found this book really intriguing and the writing was quite readable.

As someone who tends to enjoy all types of slow burns, I thoughtThe Centre was well executed and avoided plot bloat for the sake of tension. The climax of the book was startling and I didn't see it coming, despite the foreshadowing.

There was a lot of commentary on class, love, gender norms, friendship diaspora, and more throughout the book. I do think that there were some interesting ideas there, but that the book either needed to be longer to dig into them more or shorter and cut some of the scenes.

For example, I don't think Adam needed to come back — her conversation with him doesn't materially change her behavior or thinking and it doesn't advance the plot.

This book asks a lot of questions and leaves many of them unanswered, sometimes in a way that feels intentional and other times not so much. But overall, I did find it compelling and I'll definitely be thinking about it.

I honestly don't know how I'd rate this book... certain chapters, especially those that touch on ‘The Centre', the language bits, (sans the whole dark side) felt quite interesting and intriguing. I'd have rated it higher had it not been bad Muslim rep and certain other parts that made me want to rate it as low as 1-star

This was pretty good. I liked the conversations and ideas that were brought up over the course of the book. The only thing keeping me from giving it a 5 is that I wanted more suspense/thrilling moments. I wanted to be on the edge of my seat and I wanted the sinister level to bump up to 11. That being said, I enjoyed the book. I don't know why it has such low ratings.

Ugh, I finished it. This book took me in so many directions and not in a good way. I guess I'd just say I was confused for most of it. There are so many things that are touched on but not really developed at all. Another reviewer stated that the main character was not likable and that's very true. It took a conversation from one of her ex-lovers halfway through the book for me to realize that. I wasn't really putting my finger on it until then. When you read about the Centre you know there is a secret and one starts hypothesizing what it could be. What it actually is was disturbing and I almost stopped reading the book there. Basically the book wasn't satisfying in any way.