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A review by booksamongstfriends
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
3.0
2.5 rounded up. Am I supposed to feel bad for the dad? Or the mom? The only character I really wanted to hear from was the daughter, and I really didn’t get to hear from her until the end of the book. This book was very disappointing. I was so excited to read it; I even tried to get an advance reader copy and did not get one, so maybe I should’ve taken that as a sign.
One of my pet peeves with books is when they really hype up a secret and then the secret is very mild or tame. Especially in today’s crazy culture and world, where you could really be pushing the bounds on what the secret is, especially when it comes to family or generational literature. Because off the top, when he tells us in the beginning he’s the father of this child and he’s been sober for all these years, now he wants to be the daddy? What has stopped you from pursuing a relationship with her, especially if you are the biological father legally?
Just again, sometimes the books are like this for books' sake. Like the mom just up and taking the baby and saying, “Well, I want my kid to be native”… but babe your kid is half-white. And as a black woman, I completely understand the cultural impact of her decision. But where it lost me was when her daughter got sick and had been sick at a very young age, and she knew that her real father was right across the river.
A lot of the characters and their choices were based on selfishness, and it really made it hard to feel bad for any of them or really care about what happened. Even the whole secret with his dad and the hunting incident. This huge guilt and relationship with his mother who has dementia. It just felt like an additional storyline to add some vegetables into the pot in hopes that it will finally boil over.
But unfortunately, you asked for a beef stew, and there wasn’t enough broth or meat, so some of these additional storylines didn’t do much to make the soup tasty, and the flame wasn’t that high up. So by the end of the book, you feel like you’re getting served a lukewarm bowl of a mediocre version of a dish you really wanted. But apparently, the author ran out of the actual ingredients to make it and just threw some other stuff in there instead.
This book would’ve been so much better if he didn’t know that it was his daughter for some time. If the author had spent more time going in depth into the relationship between Mary and the main character. If being native played an even larger role in the separation of him and Mary instead of just a literal river and her choice to withhold their daughter. We got a moments of council decisions in a sense taking responsibility out of their hands. It made the culture seem like an overbearing parent and less of something they were both ingrained in within their own ways. I was especially annoyed with fathers death. It would’ve made sense if he actually had some kind of involvement or at least had been present for the incident with his stepfather. I’m not even going to start on the random friend who drinks and hangs around; it’s just again more vegetables. This book ultimately left me unsatisfied. I was the friend who was invited over, promised a feast, and still had to go to Wendy’s after I left.
One of my pet peeves with books is when they really hype up a secret and then the secret is very mild or tame. Especially in today’s crazy culture and world, where you could really be pushing the bounds on what the secret is, especially when it comes to family or generational literature. Because off the top, when he tells us in the beginning he’s the father of this child and he’s been sober for all these years, now he wants to be the daddy? What has stopped you from pursuing a relationship with her, especially if you are the biological father legally?
Just again, sometimes the books are like this for books' sake. Like the mom just up and taking the baby and saying, “Well, I want my kid to be native”… but babe your kid is half-white. And as a black woman, I completely understand the cultural impact of her decision. But where it lost me was when her daughter got sick and had been sick at a very young age, and she knew that her real father was right across the river.
A lot of the characters and their choices were based on selfishness, and it really made it hard to feel bad for any of them or really care about what happened. Even the whole secret with his dad and the hunting incident. This huge guilt and relationship with his mother who has dementia. It just felt like an additional storyline to add some vegetables into the pot in hopes that it will finally boil over.
But unfortunately, you asked for a beef stew, and there wasn’t enough broth or meat, so some of these additional storylines didn’t do much to make the soup tasty, and the flame wasn’t that high up. So by the end of the book, you feel like you’re getting served a lukewarm bowl of a mediocre version of a dish you really wanted. But apparently, the author ran out of the actual ingredients to make it and just threw some other stuff in there instead.
This book would’ve been so much better if he didn’t know that it was his daughter for some time. If the author had spent more time going in depth into the relationship between Mary and the main character. If being native played an even larger role in the separation of him and Mary instead of just a literal river and her choice to withhold their daughter. We got a moments of council decisions in a sense taking responsibility out of their hands. It made the culture seem like an overbearing parent and less of something they were both ingrained in within their own ways. I was especially annoyed with fathers death. It would’ve made sense if he actually had some kind of involvement or at least had been present for the incident with his stepfather. I’m not even going to start on the random friend who drinks and hangs around; it’s just again more vegetables. This book ultimately left me unsatisfied. I was the friend who was invited over, promised a feast, and still had to go to Wendy’s after I left.