“So moom, did you hate the book?” A book blahg to approach with caution
My answer to that question was an unqualified “No!” The book was “All Fours” and I encountered it because it flew by on my daughter’s Goodreads feed. So I added it to my to-reads and then I *read* it. She seemed a weeeee bit surprised that I might take such a book on🤣
Yesterday we spent some time talking about the book over lunch and I think we landed more or less in some of the same places. First, it is a very weird book. There are characters that are not necessarily likeable who do cringe-worthy things that absolutely drive me NUTSO. “Difficult” themes abound.
And sex… There is QUITE a lot of sex, some of it pretty raunchy. I teetered on the edge of whether I wanted to call it “gratuitous sex”. My definition for that phrase is something like “sex that is in the book for no real reason except to put sex in the book and doesn’t add to the story.” In the end, I decided that for the most part the sex in this book was in fact part of the story. But it is probably not to everyone’s taste.
So I enjoyed the book even when I was cringing and may at some point explore more of the author’s work. It’s cool to be able to talk about things like that with your adult daughter. But then, even when my kids were small, I read them some stuff that I’m gonna guess some parents might want banned. “Gorky Rises” for one (the young frog protagonist has *got* to be on hallucinogens) and a whole bunch of Roald Dahl stuff. And then there was the time we were at the moomincabin and she read “Mother Earth, Father Sky” because it was on her grandparents’ bookshelves. None of the adults had actually *read* it so had no clue how much sex and violence was in it. She survived the experience and I eventually read the book (first in a trilogy). It’s by an eastern yooperland author from a town a short distance from the moominbeach and is VERY GOOD!
All that said. I only tentatively recommend “All Fours”. Like I said, there is a LOT of raunchy sex, difficult themes and characters and some very weird stuff on top of it all. If you are interested, do some research first! I’ve only participated in one session of one book club in my life but I suspect most book clubs would not get along with this book. If it’s not your cuppa, I won’t be offended.
January 13th, 2025 at 10:59 pm
We’ve read some weird books in BC but some of us have enjoyed them. The raunchy sex and violence would probably disqualify this choice though. I was never restricted in my reading although I had nightmares about the horse’s head from “The Godfather” for several weeks.