Thought Train to Pusan

I haven’t read any of Sarah Waters’ works previously, though I did get about 20 pages into The Fingersmith before giving up as the language was just really difficult for me to get into (I have seen The Handmaiden a few times already anyways, and do love that movie a lot). But I watched the film adaptation of The Little Stranger recently and thought it might be worth a shot! And The Night Watch sounded interesting enough: the interwoven lives, secrets, identities, and shames of various people set within the backdrop of WWII London, living their everyday lives that aren’t necessarily tied up directly in the war in terms of fighting like you may find in a lot of WWII historical fiction, but their experiences and how things play out are still so inherently tied into this cultural context, showing the effect on lives beyond the front lines. The twist in The Night Watch , however, is that we begin after the war has ended, seeing the point of view of four different...

--> To say that this book is inelegant with the subjects it attempts to deal with is putting it kindly: this novel is obnoxious and gross. I don’t even remember how I first became aware of it, but I remember reading a synopsis and thinking, “that can’t be right?” I was baffled as to how it would work, and thought I certainly wouldn’t like it. But curiosity got the best of me (oh, also the author stating that people should read it before criticizing it, due to some backlash, and you know what, that’s fair enough), and turns out it was even worse than I imagined! Adam is about a teenage boy (Adam, as you can imagine) who goes to visit his college-age lesbian sister for a summer in New York in 2006, where she introduces Adam to the LGBTQ scene: here, he meets a gay woman named Gillian, who he begins a relationship with after she mistakes him for a transgendered male. This is a short and sweet blip of the basic premise, but unfortunately, I feel like this review is ...