This book was so good. It was gruesome and gory and horrendous but so perfectly written. It was like a car wreck on the side of the highway that you just can’t look away from. Sickening, disgusting, vile, made me want to throw up in places. I thought it couldn’t possible be that bad or that grotesque or even disturbing to me, I have seen and read my fair share of disturbing shit, and before I even got to the playground I realized that it WAS that disturbing and it definitely WAS that bad. All of the characters were perfectly written and given full depth, there were no two dimensional characters in the entire book in my opinion. We see the motivation and struggles and inner demons of every character introduced, even the nonverbal child, and it makes it that much more devastating since the characters are so well rounded and humanized. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so immersed in a book before.
There were twists that I didn’t expect but were shocking and added so much depth and meaning to the previous chapters. And the ending made me cry. I won’t spoil it here, but the last scene with Rock in it was so devastating and provided a perfect close to the story. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it again because knowing the story and a lot of the details would detract from the raw emotions of it all I think, but it was one of my favorites.
It was an easy read (at least, as far as how its actually written, I had to take my fair share of breathers because the subject matter is hard) and I finished it in three days. I haven’t finished a book in under two weeks since I was probably in middle school, and I read maybe 5 books a year if that, so it being an easy read to me really added to my takeaway from the book.
I’m going to go back through my kindle notes to do my in-depth review and analysis later on my blog, but I did want to mention the heavy anticapitalist themes that added so much to the book as well. One of the key themes that was repeated over and over is that all the money in the world couldn’t buy Geraldine the one thing that she ever truly wanted, and the one thing that ever would have made her happy. Her richness was seen as the driving force behind her evil, and we were left with the idea that no matter who you hurt or exploit, sometimes there is not enough money in the world to buy you what you truly want.
And lastly, I do want to leave a content warning here, not for the obvious themes of child torture and death, but for a few that I wasn’t expecting. Incest is a heavy theme throughout the entire book, and a vital driving force to the plot, and sexual assault is mentioned or described in detail several times. There are also a few scenes describing animals abuse/death. Even without those themes, the book is not for people who are squeamish or people who are afraid of body horror. But fuck, the imagery used was horrendous and compelling, and I’m not sure even a movie could do this justice
by caydendov