el dang reviewed Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo
Devastating
5 stars
How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?
I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.
It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly …
How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?
I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.
It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.
And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.