Julia Shaw > Recent Status Updates

Not sure I’ll be finishing this - some really disappointing and fat-phobic bias that is just wrong on the science. Draping these harmful views in the language of spirituality doesn’t make it okay.

This is one of those “I understand the individual words, but not what they mean when put in that order” experiences, stretched out over the span of the whole book. “Had she committed a Bexit?” What does that mean? “No we should not all be subway franchise owners of the mind”…huh? Bewildering.

I’m enjoying it, but not sure I can stomach the hideous and extreme anti-choice content. A raped, abused, homeless 14-year-old should by no means be coerced into carrying her rapist’s baby to term. Disgusting.

Whoever thought the masturbatory fantasies of a self-pitying, melodramatic, self-centered child would be enough to sustain a novel...was wrong. Really lost me when the narrator compared the death by suicide of one character’s friend to the recent quasi-fight she had with her own best friend. (A “fight,” by the way, that ended with the friend saying how much she loved the narrator.) Beyond insipid.

Long on instant chemistry and heavy breathing, short on genuine emotion, plot, conflict, and romance. Rife with cliches. I’m bored and annoyed with this book, which is unusual with porn.

“Novel” feels like an inaccurate description: this is a collection of interconnected short stories, not a novel.