BOOK REVIEW: BROKEN MONSTERS

This past Summer, we started a feature we are pretty stoked about over here at You Me Oui- the monthly Book Club. For Octoberr- we read Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes. This was Carly's pick, but we were both pretty excited to read it! So we did!

WARNING: post may contain spoiler alerts!!! Read ahead with caution!!! You have been warned!

What was you favorite part or parts of the book?
CARLY: My favorite thing about this book is that it is told from multiple perspectives but still in the third person. So although you are told what people are thinking, their thoughts aren't clouded by that first person barrier that can sometimes suggest mistrust.

SINA:  I like that the book told a whole story from start to finish. It didn't leave any parts out.

What was your least favorite part or parts of the book?
C: I also read The Shining Girls by this same author this month, and she is a fan of following multiple characters, and also multiple timelines. I felt like Broken Monsters was much more confusing in this regard because they refer to some dates but it's unclear if there is a jumping back and forth. And it's also tough to keep track of the characters.

S:  I really struggled with some of the jumping around. I have read a lot of books like it before, but it was tough to follow at some points,

Who was your favorite character?
C:  In a weird way, I kind of liked Jonno. He had ways of seeming like he was horribly out of touch, but that he always kind of had a sense that he was, so maybe it was ok. If that makes sense. Like he knew he wasn't cool really, but he owned his lack of cool, or carried on in the hipster crowds in spite of it.

S:  It was sort of difficult to have a favorite character. I did however like the daughter Layla- she was sort of funny and crass. I liked that she was taking it upon herself to catch a predator.

Who was your least favorite character?
C:  I don't know that I had a least favorite, all the others made me equally indifferent. None of them were particularly awful, except Clayton of course.

S:  I didn't really care for Jen Q all that much. I thought she was very annoying at points of the book- especially when they were shooting the art film.

What are your thoughts on the characters as a whole?

C: Beukes makes it very difficult to keep character traits straight because there is so much jumping around, so it's hard for me to have strong feelings about any of the characters in particular. 

S:  They didn't really do much for me. I was not all that moved by any of them, and none of them really stood out at me.

What surprised you most about the book?

C: That it took me until it was specifically described for me to figure out that Clayton was the killer (or the vehicle for killing) even after he had hit the deer and kept talking about not looking at his fridge. I don't know why, but of course in retrospect that seemed more obvious.

S:  Who the murder was! I was actually surprising a different twist.

Was there anything else that you found particularly unexpected?

C: Pretty much the whole book was unexpected. She writes a story in a way that connects reality and supernatural better than most other books I read. I like that it takes the scary parts of the book and makes them feel less threatening by adding elements of extreme implausibility to them. 

S:  Not really.

Did you like how the book was written?

C: As I mentioned earlier since this is the second book I've read by her I was sort of prepared for her style of writing, but I liked it less in this book. It felt more disjointed. Knowing she's a South African writer I'm also curious how she wrote this book and did her research on Detroit. I'm not questioning the integrity, it's just very detailed. To a point where the city is almost a character, and that takes first hand knowledge.

S:  I like that we heard the story from different peoples perspectives. I think that it made the story a lot more interesting than just a normal murder tale. That being said, I think the way that it was told - having the text messages, and callers to the hotlines, and all of the other additional types of writing styles, it was sort of hard to follow along, but it made it interesting. It was sort of like reading a mix of Hannibal and True Detective- with the weird murders and such- and the way that the book just back and forth from story lines is kind of like Game of Thrones, I ultimately enjoyed it.

Was there any particular part of the book that really stood out to you?

C: Uniquely I found this whole book fairly unpredictable, which is very refreshing these days. So nothing in particular stood out, except that I almost never saw anything coming. 

S:  I liked when Layla beat up the boy at school and his teeth fell out.

Happy Halloween everyone! See you next week!