Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Lakewood by Megan Giddings

20 reviews

srhi96's review against another edition

dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Racism, and Torture

Moderate: Grief, Violence, Cancer, Terminal illness, Death of parent, Gun violence, and Blood

Minor: Addiction, Vomit, and Excrement

lamorna's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

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

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Injury/Injury detail, and Violence

Moderate: Cancer, Drug use, Dementia, Confinement, Medical trauma, Death of parent, and Grief

bouebooks's review against another edition

dark reflective tense slow-paced

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

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Body horror, Injury/Injury detail, Torture, Chronic illness, Death, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Medical content, Murder, Physical abuse, and Violence

princesspeachry's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense slow-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

5.0

This book was so beautiful and SO good at making the reader feel unsettled and like they have to question everything: the narrator, the plot points, their own reality. I read it in October as a spooky season read, and boy did it deliver! I love books that are both thought provoking and pleasantly horror-y.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Violence, and Chronic illness

Moderate: Racism

mlindsay27's review against another edition

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Medical content, Medical trauma, Violence, Torture, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Racism, Injury/Injury detail, and Gore

Moderate: Panic attacks/disorders and Body horror

amressing's review

challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Racism, Violence, Torture, Medical content, and Gore

Moderate: Vomit, Blood, and Chronic illness

sherbertwells's review

dark emotional fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Before I begin my review, I’d like to thank Ms. Saunders for generously giving me this book. I wish I had taken better care of it. Without you I would never have encountered it, and it really expanded my horizons!

I’m not normally a fan of horror in fiction. Lakewood by Megan Giddings is the first horror/thriller novel I can recall reading. I don’t know how closely the book hews to the tropes of its genre or whether it’s a ‘proper’ thriller at all. It disappeared a few hours after I finished reading it, so I can’t exactly comb through it and pick out the most atmospheric quotes. Then again, disappearing books are pretty spooky.

The reviews I watched in advance for this book claimed it was terrifying. It was horror because it was real, because the US government really had exploited people for years in horrible projects like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Project Stargate. For the first half of the book, I was frozen in terror as Giddings patiently revealed the main character: Lena is a black millennial whose mother, Deziree, suffers debilitating migraines, and in order to pay the family’s medical debts she volunteers for a sketchy government experiment in the fictional Michigan town of Lakewood. In fact, the first half of Lakewood isn’t grotesque or ugly at all, merely thick with dread. I read it all in one sitting because I kept expecting something terrible to happen.

I sort of expected the horrible parts of the plot to be satisfying or to wrap up neatly or at least to explain what’s happening in the eponymous town. But unlike the creepy white observers whose omnipresence leads to some of Lakewood’s best scenes, Giddings isn’t concerned with the disgusting details of the experiment. Instead she focuses on its human costs; Lena, her mother and dead grandmother each have a mysterious tie to the US Government’s legacy of scientific exploitation, and only by understanding their history can they put their common demons to rest.

The world requires a book like this, and I require this book more than I like it. The Tuskegee syphilis study and other unethical experiments are real American horror stories. It makes perfect sense to retell it as a thriller. I just don’t understand thrillers, and now I can’t even find the goshdarn book!

I won’t forget it, though. The name “Lakewood” summons a chilling story from my own past.

A few years ago I spent a month at a German-immersion summer camp whose gift shop doesn’t sell postcards. Twenty years before the village opened in 1961, the Nazis had forced Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz to write to their families about how wonderful their new residence was. The letters’ authors were murdered and their addresses were collected for further atrocities. Because the name of the fictional location was so generic and idyllic-sounding, the founders of a wholesome little immersion program in Bemidji had accidentally chosen it for their flagship village. When a French village opened, then a Spanish one—there are twenty now—the creators copied and pasted the original title until the woods of northern Minnesota were dotted with identically-named projects.

That name? Waldsee.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror and Medical content

Moderate: Confinement, Death, Drug use, Gore, Racism, Violence, and Vomit

Minor: Death of parent and Grief

caseythereader's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Ableism, Blood, Body horror, Cancer, Child abuse, Chronic illness, Cursing, Death, Death of parent, Dementia, Drug use, Gore, Gun violence, Medical content, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Murder, Racism, Terminal illness, Violence, and Vomit

deefenestrate's review

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Gore, Grief, Medical content, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Torture, Gun violence, and Violence

horizonous's review

I struggled with the writing quite a bit, for some reason it felt clunky and at times so incoherent that I constantly had to re-read certain sentences or passages to understand who's talking or doing what. On top of that I was very bored by the story.. I read a couple of reviews to see, if it would pick up and based on those reviews I strongly assume this just isn't for me.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Grief, Medical content, Murder, and Violence

Minor: Drug abuse, Racism, Sexual assault, and Vomit