For transparency, I’ve reached December and realised I am horribly behind compiling these reviews and I have read so many book this year so here’s another one!! Surprise!! You just may get another before the sun sets. This trio sees us enter a therapist’s office, take a trip in dangerous Renaissance Italy and get VIP access-all-areas into an exclusive women’s club. It includes; Baek See-hee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait and Andrea Bartz’s The Herd.
I WANT TO DIE BUT I WANT TO EAT TTEOKBOKKI – ★★★
Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? – depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can’t be normal. But if she’s so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?
Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse.
Marketed as part memoir, part self-help book, I struggled with getting into I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. It’s solely focused on the ups and downs of mental health, but it is basically transcripts of the author’s therapy sessions with her therapist, with some diary entry style self reflections added in after each session. It felt very surface level, with no real depth. A large chunk of the book is just the back and forth between her and her therapist.
While it’s brave to air conversations with your therapist for the public to consume, it becomes very repetitive. It is common for therapy sessions to retread old ground but when you’re reading, the format gets old really fast and ends up feeling like a lazy finished product, especially when the author’s self reflections are so brief. It was almost a bit too clinical rather than compelling.
I commend her honesty about her experiences with depression and anxiety and the candid approach but for me, it lacked substance and impact. It felt hollow. The structure is also awkward at times but I suspect that could be largely down to the translation.
I love her seeking out therapy (but for real, please find a better therapist!!) and it was reassuring to relate to the author’s intense feelings and how she interprets events in her life but the level of advice and support is quite poor that I would struggle to call this a motivational ‘self-help’ read. It just felt like I was eavesdropping on someone else’s therapy sessions, which not what I expected from a book that has been so massively raved about.
THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT – ★★★
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?
As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
This was my first Maggie O’Farrell novel and I feel like I picked an intense one to start with. The Marriage Portrait reimagines the fascinating mystery of Lucrezia de Medici who fears for her life after marrying Duke Alfonso.
As a gal who was an ardent history nerd in her teens, I have always found the Renaissance and the Medici family captivating. I enjoyed O’Farrell’s portrayal of this young girl who is forced to grow up quickly in order to survive in a world filled with intrigue and danger. The most engaging moments of the novel were the scenes where Lucrezia slowly begins to work out that Alfonso plans to kill her. The tension in is palpable and you can feel Lucrezia’s fear emanating from the page. For me, that is where O’Farrell’s writing excels the most. Yet, the rest of the book didn’t quite gel for me.
While the glimpses of Lucrezia’s backstory and upbringing had its interesting parts, it often felt as though I was reading a textbook. As I say, I haven’t read anything else by O’Farrell but she is so praised in literary circles that I expected something that would blow my socks off. Instead, I think I failed to connect with her style of writing. The pacing is quite off in parts and the descriptions are often overly detailed and fanciful for my tastes. I just wanted her to get the action!
It’s 350 or so pages long but by the end, I just didn’t feel satisfied. Despite the many pages dedicated to her life as a young girl, I didn’t feel like we had much of a chance to fully explore Lucrezia and felt a bit duped by the blurb. While Alfonso is certainly plotting murder, he is largely absent and it was a bit of anticlimax. The Marriage Portrait was sadly devoid of the chutzpah it needed to carry such a tragic and compelling mystery.
THE HERD – ★★
The name of the elite, women-only coworking space stretches across the wall behind the check-in desk: THE HERD, the H-E-R always in purple. In-the-know New Yorkers crawl over each other to apply for membership to this community that prides itself on mentorship and empowerment. Among the hopefuls is Katie Bradley, who’s just returned from the Midwest after a stint of book research blew up in her face. Luckily, Katie has an in, thanks to her sister Hana, an original Herder and the best friend of Eleanor Walsh, its charismatic founder.
As head of PR, Hana is working around the clock in preparation for a huge announcement from Eleanor—one that would change the trajectory of The Herd forever.Then, on the night of the glitzy Herd news conference, Eleanor vanishes without a trace. Everybody has a theory about what made Eleanor run, but when the police suggest foul play, everyone is a suspect.
As a PR girlie, I was SO excited for The Herd but sadly, it fell flat. It started off quite strong, teasing the exploration of girl power and complicated dynamics in an all-female co-working space. There are the bones of a good story there but it just wasn’t executed in the most polished or thought-provoking manner.
Herd tries to critique hypocritical female entrepreneurs who preach empowerment whilst profiting from women’s insecurities. The first half tries its best to commit to this and we get the starters of a interesting suspense novel. However, it rapidly evolved into a cliched hot mess. As love interests and ex-boyfriends entered the crime scene, the female characters all blurred into one and became caricatures that were hard to connect and root for.
There’s a lot of backstabbing and there are several twists that stretched the book beyond the realms of plausability. I love an implausible WTF thriller as much as the next person but the twists and reveals felt very forced. I was hoping for a smart, feminist thriller but instead, I got a season of Pretty Little Liars without any of the fun characters. The story had so much potential and probably would have more engaging had Bartz focused on the Herd club and the toxic feminism within it. Sadly, The Herd is very much a predictable thriller that lacks intrigue and is filled with characters that are devoid of personality and distinct voices.
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