Ally’s Reviews > The Catcher in the Rye > Status Update

Not a lot of swearing this time, so yay. But we did reach a controversial part where the mc gets a prostitute. But he ended up just chatting with her, paying her, then letting her leave, so I don’t know why it’s so controversial. He keeps lying to people and introducing himself with fake names though, which is mildly annoying.

I swear they curse about 10 times per page minimum. It’s a distasteful amount of swearing. It’s so annoying, but Holden (the mc) is slightly more bearable now. Probably just me getting used to him tbh.

He spent most of chapter 4 yapping about this girl he knew (which was annoying) and then half of chapter 5 yapping about his dead brother (who actually sounds like a cool character. I wish he was the mc). This man is a professional yapper. If you got rid of all the repetition and extra words, as well as all the swearing, I feel like this book would be half its current length.

So this book is in first person, and he literally started chapter 3 with “I’m a great liar.” So now we have a biased, judgmental, and unreliable narrator as our main character. And oh my god the characters just keep repeating the same thing over and over and OVER! Istg this book is going to make me crash out. On the plus side, he’s not as boring as the mc from Fahrenheit 451

Holden (the mc) is so annoying. He is extremely pessimistic, judgmental, and doesn’t interact with anyone he deems a “phony”, and then he wonders why he has no friends! He’s like “everyone at this school sucks they’re all phonies” and then goes “why do I have no friends? I guess everyone just hates me”. And this is only 2 chapters in. Each page I want to punt him slightly more than the last.

Reading it for english. I’ve skimmed the first few pages and I already hate the main character. He’s basically white boy living in the suburbs complaining about being a white boy living in the suburbs. It’s giving “my life is so hard, nobody understands me, I’m a loner” when both of his parents have stable jobs and he’s gonna get a new car on his 16th birthday. I want to punch him already.