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Demetra Brodsky

Författare till Last Girls

2 verk 118 medlemmar 3 recensioner

Verk av Demetra Brodsky

Last Girls (2020) 65 exemplar
Dive Smack (2018) 53 exemplar

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I received this book free via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Brilliant. Full review at www.coffeeandtrainspotting.wordpress.com
 
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SarahRita | 1 annan recension | Aug 11, 2021 |
“Our end will bring our beginning to light.”

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for child abuse.)

"When I reminisce about the pieces of art I’ve left behind over the years, I get pensive. I could have taken them, but I chose to leave them behind, in places we lived, in art rooms at different schools. Never signed, but as an artistic Honey Was Here trail."

"If we were living in a different time, she’d be the first of us weirds to be tried as a witch. Birdie would be next, for failure to cooperate with the magistrates. And then me, because with my sisters persecuted I would straight up lose my mind."

Sixteen-year-old Honey Juniper and her two younger sisters - Birdie and Blue, collectively known at Elkwood High as "the weird sisters" - are preppers. Along with a handful of other families, they live on a secret compound in the backwoods of Washington State. Dieter Ackerman's acolytes hide in plain sight: bartering and selling homemade goods in the small town of Elkwood, attending nearby Elkwood High School, pretending to live in the mobile home park they use for extra storage.

Though the Juniper sisters have moved five times in ten years, it's starting to look like the Nest might be their final home...at least, until Dieter's increasingly risky and erratic behavior, coupled with Alice Juniper's social climbing, proves to be their undoing.

I expected to enjoy Last Girls so much more than I did. I mean, doomsday preppers! Badass sisters with pouty lips and wild hairdos! Forbidden love/lust! Sick presidential burns! Cultish stuff galore! A freaking peregrine falcon! Alas, it was not meant to be.

I think my main gripe is that there's just too much going on here. A story about three sisters caught in a doomed doomsday prepper group (lol, see what I did there?) is interesting enough on its own. The culture of paranoia would make for a rather gripping psychological thriller; throw in some teenage hormones a la Remy and Honey, and you've got yourself one rousing tale. But on top of a prepper cult engaged in some sketchy terrorist activities and maybe under investigation by the authorities, we also have a triple kidnapping and some random psychic shit thrown in to make things extra weird, I guess.

To be fair, Blue's prophecies are obvious throwbacks to Shakespeare's witches - as are the sisters, collectively - as well as Cassandra of Greek mythology. Even so, it's all just too much.

I also felt like many of the characters, including Honey and her sisters, could have been fleshed out more. The Juniper sisters feel more like a collection of quirks and eccentricities than honest-to-goodness people. And the secondary characters? Ugh. Caricatures, mostly: Magda is the jealous scorned wife; Annalise, the power-hungry second child; Dieter, the erratic messiah. Even Alice Juniper is elusive at best, and it's her actions that set this whole story in motion.

There's an exhilarating seed of a story here that sadly never fully blooms. I'm sure Blue would have something especially prescient to say here.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2020/05/05/last-girls-by-demetra-brodsky/
… (mer)
 
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smiteme | 1 annan recension | Mar 2, 2020 |
So it was quite easy to give this twisty and exciting psychological a 5-star review. It has been harder to put into words every single thing as to why, because I was so taken by surprise by Demetra’s brilliant debut novel. It seems as though from the moment I laid eyes on the beautiful cover for ‘Dive Smack’ (the flames above a young man plunging into the water), I needed to read it. And then I was immediately lost inside this book from the opening two quotes, particularly this one from Carl Jung,

"Your vision will become clear when you look inside your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."

What a way to start the book!

If you read the synopsis of the book above, you'll know by now that it’s about Theo Mackey, a high school springboard diver who has had both of his parents pass away tragically, and then he starts to question the memories he has of the fire that killed his mom, particularly as new ones surface as he researches a family project for school. Theo luckily has some great friends he can count on, but he lives with his alcoholic grandfather (GP), and he's starting to find his home life and new stressors are affecting his usually perfect diving, something he can’t afford to screw up, being the captain of Team Monarch. And the big school family project is what really starts to mess with Theo’s understanding of the fire, his family, and this makes him question what’s going on in his head. It seems he’s gradually losing his grip. That’s really what leads him to get more help from Dr. Maddox, a family friend and psychiatrist.
*Note: I’m leaving a LOT of story/plot out, so there are no spoilers.

Now that’s a very basic overview of what you are getting yourself into with this, but it goes from being a book about this likable guy on the diving team at a high school (and I now know so much more about springboard diving beyond my watching the Olympics every four years), to being a very clever, psychological thriller with details and twists I never expected. Demetra has employed some very clever writing devices that make this a standout: I love the way she begins each chapter with a diving term that correlates to the part of the story that it contains (note that Dive Smack is pretty painful), which is absolute genius. Her writing is also very fluid, and weaving interludes with the past and other ‘voices’ are done seamlessly. Also, since this is a thriller, the pacing builds up steadily to an eventual crescendo, within an ending where all the tense energy flows throughout the end chapters.


Theo is such a well-fleshed out character (as are Chip, Iris, Amy, and others), that you really get a feel for who this guy is; Demetra has created so many endearing things about about him, that you can’t help but root for him the whole way through: we know he has two moles on his face, his car is called Bumblebee after the Transformer, he likes classic rock, and of course, he's an orphan. And he likes to use puns.

But the real treat in this book is how it ropes you in (it gets better and better the deeper you dive in: pun intended), how it becomes way more than a book about a few high schoolers; it becomes about a sensitive young man uncovering his past and the deception that is swirling around him. Then the massive and very dark twist at the end takes the reader, and Theo, by surprise, making this precisely what earns this book its top marks. It left me tearful, it made me laugh, AND gasp. I can’t wait to see what comes from Demetra next, especially if it’s another thriller as riveting and original as this one.

*And just so you know - Dive Smack: When a diver under or over rotates or twists on a dive, hitting the water with enough force to cause pain or physical injury.
… (mer)
 
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kamoorephoto | Jun 15, 2018 |

Priser

Statistik

Verk
2
Medlemmar
118
Popularitet
#167,490
Betyg
3.9
Recensioner
3
ISBN
10

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