Review: West by Carys Davies
Tia
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Uncomfortable.
This review is going to be short but not sweet, because I have nothing good to say about this book.
‘West’ was so boring to read. In 1800s America, a man abandons his daughter to hunt for dinosaur bones and then dies.
Almost nothing happens, until the very end when the author realises how boring their book is so they decide to add a scene with sexual violence.
This is a cheap sucker punch to elicit an emotional response from the reader. Adding sexual violence for the shock value does not make your writing good.
Most disturbingly, when the victim is rescued from the attacker the author frames the scene with a romantic nuance. Just wow. You created this character and organised the story for her to be sexually assaulted and then rescued, so that you could achieve some sort of twisted poetic beauty??
After the assault, the character just picks up the pieces like nothing has happened and goes on with her life. The book has no acknowledgement of trauma.
In my value system, it’s harmful and exploitative for authors to carelessly include sexual violence for shock value. It’s a disturbing misrepresentation of the realities of sexual violence, and it perpetuates society’s blasé attitude to the mistreatment of women.
If your book is so boring that you want to add sexual violence just to spice it up, maybe you should rethink it.*
The writing style itself was so plain and even awkward. Some reviewers might consider it a kind of elegant minimalism. To me, it just seemed like a very early outline of a story that was yet to be fleshed out.
If I hadn’t been trapped on a plane with nothing else to read I think I wouldn’t have bothered to finish reading it.
0 out of 5 dinosaur bones. Yes, ZERO!
FYI: Contains paedophilia, grooming, and sexual violence.
*Some authors depict sexual violence in responsible ways to start provocative and important discussions. They give their characters a voice, allow them to confront trauma, and show the problems characters face in the way society views them.
A far better option:
