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Title: Private Rites
Author: Julia Armfield
Narrator: Hannah van der Westhuysen
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 563,645
Text Number: 2129
Read Because: this review (accurate but sadly not indicative), audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Three sisters, all lesbians, all troubled, are reunited by their father's death while, around them, climate change builds to a slow apocalypse. My takeaway is as with most genre fiction meets literary fiction: I'm not fond of the latter, and when combined both suffer. Very talky about the slow banality of the end times and about grief, sometimes effectively but often overwrought; and I'm not sold on the mystery of the framing conceit, particularly in its resolution. This is fine, but failed to work for me in a mild, persistent way.
(Going to chock this up to audio reading, but I could never tell the older sisters apart. One was a therapist, one was married, one was getting divorced, one was angry, only being Angry™ was rightly the characterization all the way down the line, so they smushed into an angry therapist vacillating between the best relationship in the book and incipient divorce. Oops?)
Author: Julia Armfield
Narrator: Hannah van der Westhuysen
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 563,645
Text Number: 2129
Read Because: this review (accurate but sadly not indicative), audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Three sisters, all lesbians, all troubled, are reunited by their father's death while, around them, climate change builds to a slow apocalypse. My takeaway is as with most genre fiction meets literary fiction: I'm not fond of the latter, and when combined both suffer. Very talky about the slow banality of the end times and about grief, sometimes effectively but often overwrought; and I'm not sold on the mystery of the framing conceit, particularly in its resolution. This is fine, but failed to work for me in a mild, persistent way.
(Going to chock this up to audio reading, but I could never tell the older sisters apart. One was a therapist, one was married, one was getting divorced, one was angry, only being Angry™ was rightly the characterization all the way down the line, so they smushed into an angry therapist vacillating between the best relationship in the book and incipient divorce. Oops?)
