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celinewyp's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
weboughtazoo's review
adventurous
dark
sad
tense
fast-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
5.0
smfjanes's review
5.0
I loved this book. Something about it just really pulled me in and I couldn’t put I down. Great story, great plot twist. Loved it!
myamh1013's review
adventurous
dark
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
quirkycynic's review
1.0
Holy crap, okay, where do I even begin with this...
Okay -- one of my favourite things about YA fiction is its ability to take very big, heady, and frequently difficult topics and condense them into much smaller, but still profound, products of entertainment that aren't disingenuous to the seriousness of their subject matter. It's a tough tightrope to walk, but a lot of YA does it really well: some of my favourite YA books have been about grief, repression, PSTD and trauma, religion, mental illness, emergent sexuality, suicide... Hell, even serial murders and alien abductions.
So now we have this book, Anatomy of a Murderer, which is really no less ambitiously provocative than others of its type: it's about school shootings, psychopathy, accountability, and even the very nature of evil itself.
My problem is that I honestly have no idea at all how it wants to approach any of these really vast, really touchy topics beyond a whole mess of genre cliché and contrivances. Whatever else it tries to do, it feels like it just throws a hundred things at the wall -- and I don't even know if any of them stick, because there's too much stuff being thrown to see.
I was actually pretty much on board for the relatively uneventful first half of the plot, which has a pretty long page count but in which the most intriguing elements are introduced with a good degree of sensitivity.
Then the problem comes at about the halfway mark, when the simple and engaging story about violence and trauma that has been set up all of a sudden becomes (at once): a murder mystery, a cute m|m romance, a furious suspense-thriller, and a weird techo-sci-fi governmental military conspiracy. The plot goes all over the road and paves over pretty much all manner of subtlety that had been established thus far.
The thing that finally even really galled it for me was when the story kind of just threw out all interesting discussions of its subject matter that it could've pursued -- psychopathy, accountability, and evil, remember -- and gave them all a scapegoat by random fantastical nanotechnology MacGuffin whatsits that are the actual causes for all the bad things that occured. It's as if the book literally just forgot what it was trying to be about, and how it was trying to be interesting or unique in its approach to its subject.
I've said, too, in other reviews that I think sometimes the trap of YA fiction is forcing disparate genres and manners of storytelling into YA's own unique conventions, and honestly no more have I felt that than here in the scenes in which the two lead characters begin falling in love.
Sure, the writing is cute and bittersweet as they bond over classical music and share their first kiss (you're not gonna win me over that easily, AOFM, by having them bond over my favourite composer of all time Philip Glass!!), but -- seriously -- at all times I was reading these scenes I could not stop thinking in the back of my mind of how one of these characters is still a convicted murderer who had escaped custody to basically stalk the other one.
The author writing these scenes the way he did just felt so off in their tonal shift from what had been established, and which made the central relationship make so little sense it brings everything to a crashing holt.
So yeah, the mining of required cutesiness from these kind of fucked-up scenes, along with just so many really unbelievable plot contrivances (someone solving virtually every problem no matter how technically impossible by simply "hacking" it; a character who has been shot at least three times somehow surviving long enough for people around him to have like 15 pages of climactic monologues) I feel like in the end pretty much just torpedo any way of enjoying it for what it was.
I'm a little conflicted about giving this one star. I mean I don't out-and-out hate this book; I finished the thing, and it is pretty polished for what it is: when it wanted me to feel tense I felt tense, when it wanted me to feel sad I felt sad, ect. ect...
But at the end of the day I'm just hugely disappointed for whatever the hell it could've been, which could've been something worthwhile, that actually means something as a whole, and is unified in its themes and its storytelling. Which is not this mess.
Okay -- one of my favourite things about YA fiction is its ability to take very big, heady, and frequently difficult topics and condense them into much smaller, but still profound, products of entertainment that aren't disingenuous to the seriousness of their subject matter. It's a tough tightrope to walk, but a lot of YA does it really well: some of my favourite YA books have been about grief, repression, PSTD and trauma, religion, mental illness, emergent sexuality, suicide... Hell, even serial murders and alien abductions.
So now we have this book, Anatomy of a Murderer, which is really no less ambitiously provocative than others of its type: it's about school shootings, psychopathy, accountability, and even the very nature of evil itself.
My problem is that I honestly have no idea at all how it wants to approach any of these really vast, really touchy topics beyond a whole mess of genre cliché and contrivances. Whatever else it tries to do, it feels like it just throws a hundred things at the wall -- and I don't even know if any of them stick, because there's too much stuff being thrown to see.
I was actually pretty much on board for the relatively uneventful first half of the plot, which has a pretty long page count but in which the most intriguing elements are introduced with a good degree of sensitivity.
Then the problem comes at about the halfway mark, when the simple and engaging story about violence and trauma that has been set up all of a sudden becomes (at once): a murder mystery, a cute m|m romance, a furious suspense-thriller, and a weird techo-sci-fi governmental military conspiracy. The plot goes all over the road and paves over pretty much all manner of subtlety that had been established thus far.
The thing that finally even really galled it for me was when the story kind of just threw out all interesting discussions of its subject matter that it could've pursued -- psychopathy, accountability, and evil, remember -- and gave them all a scapegoat by random fantastical nanotechnology MacGuffin whatsits that are the actual causes for all the bad things that occured. It's as if the book literally just forgot what it was trying to be about, and how it was trying to be interesting or unique in its approach to its subject.
I've said, too, in other reviews that I think sometimes the trap of YA fiction is forcing disparate genres and manners of storytelling into YA's own unique conventions, and honestly no more have I felt that than here in the scenes in which the two lead characters begin falling in love.
Sure, the writing is cute and bittersweet as they bond over classical music and share their first kiss (you're not gonna win me over that easily, AOFM, by having them bond over my favourite composer of all time Philip Glass!!), but -- seriously -- at all times I was reading these scenes I could not stop thinking in the back of my mind of how one of these characters is still a convicted murderer who had escaped custody to basically stalk the other one.
The author writing these scenes the way he did just felt so off in their tonal shift from what had been established, and which made the central relationship make so little sense it brings everything to a crashing holt.
So yeah, the mining of required cutesiness from these kind of fucked-up scenes, along with just so many really unbelievable plot contrivances (someone solving virtually every problem no matter how technically impossible by simply "hacking" it; a character who has been shot at least three times somehow surviving long enough for people around him to have like 15 pages of climactic monologues) I feel like in the end pretty much just torpedo any way of enjoying it for what it was.
I'm a little conflicted about giving this one star. I mean I don't out-and-out hate this book; I finished the thing, and it is pretty polished for what it is: when it wanted me to feel tense I felt tense, when it wanted me to feel sad I felt sad, ect. ect...
But at the end of the day I'm just hugely disappointed for whatever the hell it could've been, which could've been something worthwhile, that actually means something as a whole, and is unified in its themes and its storytelling. Which is not this mess.
bookcosmos's review
5.0
5 stars
Another fucked up book with morally gray characters....love that for me!
Another fucked up book with morally gray characters....love that for me!
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