Reviews tagging 'Sexual violence'

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

125 reviews

haleydoeshairs's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0


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alex_likesbooks's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

i loved and hated this book. It was SO slow and heavy in the beginning but when everything started unraveling i couldn’t put it down. It was super depraved (duh) and dark and disturbing. I do wish i read TWs before just to know what i was getting into, I went in blind. I did like the portrait of female rage portrayed and a lot of the points brought up about how women are viewed by society and by men. 

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yesbethhh92's review against another edition

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

5.0

“All my life, all the men taking what they wanted and leaving when it was over.”

Wow wow wow. This was incredible. 

In Animal, Joan flees New York after witnessing a horrible act of violence. From there we follow her to Los Angeles, where she seeks out a woman named Alice for reasons that are slowly uncovered.

Joan reflects back on her life since childhood, recalling her relationship with her parents and a traumatic experience that affected the rest of her life and dictated all her future relationships with women and men. 

This book is about the entitlement, cruelty and entitlement of men, and how this manifests in women as pain, rage and madness.

I could feel the primal rage growing in me as I read this book, and the tension kept building to an emotional and devastating end. 

Lisa Taddeo is a master with words, and I love the way she created parallels between the stories of the different characters. 

I loved this so so so much. I wasn’t sure about it early on, and took some breaks from it because it’s quite slow in the earlier chapters. But once it gets going, it really gets going, and by the end I was crying.

I highly recommend this but check trigger warnings first as there as some graphic parts. 

“It was my father who had driven my mother mad. But once again, mad is not right. The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women's pain that manifested as madness.”

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clairebartholomew549's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I don't know how to feel about this book. I resonated with a lot of its themes and assertions about the ceaseless violence men commit against women and the ways our entire inner lives are shaped by the men we're exposed to, and I appreciated Joan's unabashed commitment to voicing the darkest parts of herself. But I found the plot kind of tiring, definitely disturbing, and vaguely performative; it felt a little redundant of other books I've read like it before, like The Girls and Bright Young Women, and it was not an enjoyable read.

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matlock's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5


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hanltosh's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0


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itsbilliam's review against another edition

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

4.5

please please look up TW’s before reading this book. i will never be the same person after this read. 

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laurenhannah217's review against another edition

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

4.0


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annabel98's review against another edition

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

2.5

I couldn't put Animal down. If nothing else, it's gonna grip you. But it just didn't do it for me personally, I do think a lot of that is personal taste, I think the narrator is a little too unreliable, and the really fast paced, short sentences jumped around too much. It's definitely not predictable, but you can see the outline of what is going to be revealed, just not what exactly happened; I wanted either more mystery around Joans past, or more character development from her. 

Please, please read the content warnings, and understand they are very graphic. 

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paigem4rrie's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • 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


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