Reviews with content warning for Violence - Acts of Desperation

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

38 reviews

ninavanengelen's review against another edition

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4.0

Content Warnings

sarasbooks's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.0

I would pitch this book as My year of rest and relaxation meets The picture of Dorian Gray.

In Acts of desperation we meet an unnamed narrator, a 20-something young woman who struggles with her mental health and becomes obsessed with a writer. We then follow her spiraling thoughts as she tries to make sense of why she feels and acts the way she does.

At first I fell in love with this book and was anticipating giving it a 5 star rating. The writing style was very interesting, the ideas on human psychology were rich and to a certain extent even relatable. Ciaran reminded so much of Dorian, that I felt like I was reading the same story from Sibyl's perspective. The female experience is a layered and complex one that offers a lot of depth to a literary work. It was fascinating to learn more about why we feel a certain way about certain things and how our actions are sometimes involuntarily and unconsciously linked to these feelings deeply rooted in us.

However, reaching the middle part of the book and nearing the final chapters, the book suddenly completely changed and it made me like it less. I understand how the degrading aspect of the characters and the immoral behavior is crucial to the plot but it just got a bit too much for me. The interesting inner thoughts of the protagonist that were so recurrent in the first half started to vanish and instead what we got was constant heavily triggering content of sexual violence and assault. After a few of these occurrences I started to get slightly annoyed but still hoped that it would go back to the way the book had started off but it never really did, so that kind of ruined the reading experience for me. The ending wasn't spectacular to me either, I was expecting something way more exceptional.

It's not a bad book. I think that the first half of the book is phenomenal, filled with interesting quotes and ideas but the second half of the book prevents me from recommending it to other people. I think some will still love it for its literary achievement, while others will certainly feel conflicted as I do because of how unnecessarily vulgar the last chapters are.

Content Warnings