Review: Kärt Barn

Kärt Barn by Joanne Harris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

?????????????

I just ... I don't know??? Did anything in this book actually happen? I know it's meant to be an unreliable narrator kind of thing, but it just doesn't work when the character is just flat-out lying to you for no reason. Everyone in this book pretends to be someone else, which is revealed like halfway through and then ... doesn't really matter? It didn't complicated or enrich the plot at all.

Basically, it's written in "blog format", but it doesn't work. Especially the last couple chapters DO NOT WORK as diary entries, when they're written in present tense and it being clear that the character doesn't know what is going on. That's not how blogs/diaries work, it's just not. The only way it DOES work is if nothing in the book is true, if EVERYTHING is fiction, but then ... what was the point of the story? If nothing was real, what does it fucking matter?

I would chalk it up to bad writing - especially how terrible the characters are and the unappealing writing style - but Joanne Harris CAN write, I've read books by her and liked them. That means she deliberately wrote it like this, and it makes sense - IN A WAY - because it so fit what we understand of the MC ... but it also feels like reading a gratious self-insert novel by some dude with an inflated sense of self-worth, and why would ANYONE want to read that?

Nah, I would've needed a better twist at the end, but I don't know what it could've been. The "it's all in the MCs head" seemed obv from the start, but it didn't even explicitly go there ...

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True story.