Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - The Bone People

Reviews tagging 'Drug abuse'

marioncromb's review

challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Wonderful to see an aroace (and nonbinary/gnc) main character in a Booker Prize winning book from the 80s! Honestly building a medieval stone tower by the sea to live and draw in with a well stocked booze cellar is goals tbh.
I really enjoyed spending time in the NZ setting with these characters and the ways they clashed and grew together. The book sets up several mysteries at the start that are fun to unravel and come back to at the end, although maybe some moral unease on my end at the enjoyment in unraveling one of those mysteries being '

what exactly was the traumatic abuse that happened to this child'.

The book is very long though and in the second half I was definitely flagging in places where it felt morr indulgent or repetitive. Its a little deus ex machina at the end as well, i wasn't totally convinced things could be fixed that easily, realistically. Although arguably it is about the hope of things being better, this time.

Content Warnings

jenna_smuszkiewicz's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I decided to pick up this book because I heard the main character, Kerewin, was aroace and I wanted to read more of that rep. It is very clear that Kerewin is aroace which is good. This book was just not for me. I wanted to learn more about the child's past, go in the Kerewin's path and exactly what was going on with her, and dive into the mental health of the child's adoptive father, Joe. We go a little into all of those but not enough to make the picture clear to me.

After the event

(Joe beating up Simon so hard he goes into a coma)

, I don't understand what is going on with the characters there, especially Joe and Kerewin. And I don't know how we get from what's happened in this book to the ending.

I don't understand how they can have a happy ending without reconciling more of their past and mental health struggles and child abuse that was permitted to happen

Maybe this book is meant for other people. I get that. If you do decide to read, please read the content warnings. There is a lot in this book.

Content Warnings

writingcaia's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This is the spiritual, brutal and poetic journey of three deeply traumatised humans.
Kere, a half Māori woman broken from her family, removed too from her art and her will to live, hides herself in her tower until one day having sneaked inside her abode she meets the mute and wild Simon, the long blond haired and sea foam eyed young kid the flotsam brought after a shipwreck, the only survivor of it, unable to speak for reasons unknown he can’t explain anything about who he was but there’re the strange markings on his body and something took his voice from him and made him fearful and wild. Unable to communicate his traumatised child thoughts and feelings and the reason he steals, breaks and enters peoples’ houses and acts so strangely he drives is “adoptive” father and rescuer, the Māori pakeha-life Joe completely crazy, especially since after he lost his wife and baby son. Unable to deal with Simon’s trauma and its consequences and his own loss and suffering violence seems Joe’s only option to deal with the havoc of it all. But, love is still very deep in them and it will bind these three characters unexpectedly, or maybe Simon wished it so.
There’s so much more to say about this book, this story, it moved me, it changed the way I see trauma and the violence of it on the mind and that is inflicted.
This is not an easy read, the writing is very introspective, very poetic, changes in narrative format all the time, plays with words, but you get to see the inner works of their traumas, and also their hopes, their love, another thing that makes it harder to follow is that the POV changes without warning, and there’s also a lot of Māori expressions (which I only found out in the end were most of them translated at the end of the book, still…), and, then, there’s the brutality, the unfiltered violence.
I fell in love with this tale very quickly although it took me longer than usual to get through it. I won’t recommend it to squeamish, easily disturbed people, everyone else yes, it’s such an ode to the Māori survival among the pakeha, the borderline between being one and the other, loving the roots and respecting them, while adapting to the pakeha world, it is also an ode to different people, mixed and broken, to love of all types even aromantic and asexual, which I found amazing in a book released in 1984. This was a novel debut by a Māori poet, immediately booker prize winner and a classic in the making. I definitely wish I can reread it soon. So, yeah, go read it.

Content Warnings

what_risa_is_reading's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I decided to read The Bone People as part of the 2022 PopSugar Reading Challenge (Prompt #15: A book by an Asian-American or Pacific Islander author). If it hadn't been for that purpose, I doubt I ever would have picked this one up, because as intrigued as I was by the premise, I wasn't terribly motivated to read it otherwise. Having said that... After I finished reading it last night, I literally went to Facebook and posted this:

"Have you ever read a book and kind of hated it but at the same time have a deep respect for the artistry that went into creating it and have zero regrets about having read it? Yeah. That was The Bone People for me."

This was, at the moment, the best way that I could describe my feelings about it. Since then, I've had a bit of time to think and the conclusion that I've come to is that, while I didn't like this book and wouldn't personally recommend it, I have a deep respect for the artistry of Keri Hulme's writing and I can appreciate why people think that this book is so well-written. Because it is. And so, I gave it two stars for the artistry. The characters were also really compelling in the depth of their development. Unfortunately, that's pretty much where my "good things I can say about this book" end.

As well-developed and compelling as the characters were, they weren't very sympathetic. Not even Simon (the little boy) was a sympathetic character. (Now, that speaks to the level of Keri Hulme's artistry that she was able to take a child character and make me feel very little sympathy for him, except in very specific ways, which I'll get to in just a minute.) I understand, or at least I think that I understand, that the characters weren't supposed to be likeable. I got the sense, from the entire book, that the whole purpose of this story was to highlight and examine the flawed humanity of the characters and, to that end, it was incredibly successful. I just didn't particularly like any of the characters that it examined.

Another thing, and I want to make this abundantly clear to anyone who is thinking about reading this book, because no one told me: I was NOT prepared for the graphic depictions of child abuse and alcoholism that run through the entire story. In fact, the extreme child abuse is one of the major plot (if you can say that it has a plot) motivators. There are also mild mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation by both adult and juvenile characters, so there's that, as well.

In addition to incredibly challenging and potentially triggering content in the story, this novel was also difficult to read because it moves so. incredibly. slowly. I'm fairly certain that part of that is attributable to the specific edition that I was reading having text that is so densely printed that, when you look at the pages from a (not-too-distant) distance it doesn't even look like individual lines of text, but giant blurry grayish-black patches of ink on the page, but I also think that part of it was just that there wasn't really a clear plot to follow to speak of. I guess that the events of the story followed a kind of loosely-linear organizational structure, but you have to be paying close attention to be able to find it, let alone follow it. There were also a lot of sudden shifts in point of view between the three main characters with no clear delineation, so a lot of it felt like reading three overlapping and intertwined streams of consciousness.

I think that the things that I like the most about it were the elements of magical realism and Maori culture that were incorporated throughout the novel. It was also pretty cool to read a text that included actual Maori language (there was a handy page-by-page glossary with translations at the end of the book) because I haven't had that experience before. The style was artistic and I really respect and appreciate the work that clearly went into developing the characters; I also appreciate that Keri Hulme clearly had an intimate knowledge of the settings and culture in which the story was set, but it was still incredibly challenging to read for both stylistic/technical, as well as content reasons.

Ultimately, I kind of hated The Bone People, but I didn't hate it at the same time. I definitely cannot say that I liked it but, as I mentioned previously, I still gave it two stars because I can appreciate the artistry of it, but at the end of everything, it was really just a terrible "story" about terrible people.

Content Warnings