Reviews with content warning for Blood - Die Bibliothek am Mount Char

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Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Die Bibliothek am Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

145 reviews

dominic_caudill's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-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? Yes

4.25

This book was really really great. Like fantastic and exactly what I was looking for when I set out to read it. Sort of a realistic-fantasy type of deal, where it takes place in the real world but has fictional concepts that are preestablished. Really fun read, with a pretty pretty good ending, not fantastic but still great. The middle half of the book was absolutely a blast and I loved it a whole lot. Minus .5 stars for extremely gratuitous animal violence. Why was there so much animal carnage. Felt unnecessary and not fun. But I did really love this book otherwise.

Content Warnings

charlottesreadingweb's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny fast-paced

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

3.25

This book is fun, and the plot is very creative. It definitely kept surprising me. It’s one of the more unique books I have read recently. Some trigger warnings I added under Content Warnings.

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dovedozen's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

This book was written by a man whose blog says he's fostered a bunch of dogs, but who I can only infer never learned to trim their nails and also seems to think lions are more interesting, because they're epic or whatever. Also, the racism is WILDLY out of line and VERY OBVIOUSLY comes from the author's entirely unexamined history of personal mass media consumption. The hyperviolent rapist is a man who wears a tutu for most of the book, because haha, get it, he's ~not human~ and doesn't understand which clothes go with which gender, lol? Oh, also, it's dropped halfway through the book in a throwaway line that he's black. Also the tutu came from the childhood bedroom closet of a gay man, I guess? I wish this dude didn't know what gay people were. I also wish he didn't know what dogs were, to be perfectly honest with you.

Listen to me. The pacing is awful. Scenes that don't matter are explained in excruciating detail and the lore is nothing but a series of vague gestures towards the CONCEPT of real-life mythological systems. The main character is bait-and-switched from the Woman Who Might Be Losing Her Humanity the blurb tells you about to the author's epic quipping self-insert everyman, who has the same conversation with rando after rando about how HE KNOWS, RIGHT, what's happening is REALLY weird but he has a gun and will shoot them if they don't help him fail to advance the plot. This is a book written by a middle-aged man who has seen a lot of movies and reads Neil Gaiman sometimes. Whoever edited it didn't do shit, because it barely hangs together as a coherent narrative at all. Instead it reads like the idle dark fantasy of a guy who had some free time to write one book, one time. It's a story that uses sexual assault and graphic descriptions of violence to ask the reader "wouldn't it be fucked up if" and it doesn't even have the decency to do it in a way that's well-written enough to be cathartic. It's not even that weird. It's, like, an intensely boring person's idea of what a weird book is probably like, they think.

Mount Char is nothing. It's a desperately sad waste of my ears and brain cells. It's fodder for my lifelong vendetta against Artists Who Are Just Some Guy. It's "John Dies at the End" for assholes. Whoever wrote the blurb for it is some kind of chaos genius and I hope they were paid accordingly, because if you'd asked me to describe this novel concisely, in a way that might trick people with brains into taking a chance on it, I would have simply said "no, thank you".

Fuck this book.

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syab13's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

3.5

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rachelunabridged's review against another edition

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dark sad tense medium-paced

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

4.25

Content Warnings

mccwilliams's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

2.0

This book is WACK. I knew it was going to be strange based on reviews but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Very dark. Very mysterious. Very confusing. Very very very disturbing. Gave it a 3 not because it wasn’t a good concept or because it wasn’t good writing, just because I didn’t like the way reading it made me feel. Super weird. Read it if you want to read something unlike anything you ever have before or ever wanted to really.

Content Warnings