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One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Before I get into anything else about this book: How in the world does it have so many Amazon reviews? 2,867! Stephen King's most popular books rarely break 3,000, and a lot of his famous ones have a lot fewer (Salem's Lot has 1,587). Even if this is a case of paid reviews, that seems excessive!

Anyway, on to the book. I saw a review for it in Dogear Diary, and it sounded interesting so I grabbed a copy.

It's the fictional diary of a woman who took part in the American government's (fictional) program to marry off a thousand "white" (non-native) women to the Native Americans in hopes of "taming" the tribe. While the story was interesting, I had a number of issues with this book. I'm not even sure where to start listing them...

1) Rape. There was more rape happening than in Game of Thrones, and yet it had no impact on the characters. "Ho hum, I was raped every day for the last couple years or so. Hm, I wonder what's for breakfast?"

2) All too many of the characters were complete caricatures, including typed out accents.

About a third of the way into the book, already losing interest, I made the mistake of reading the Goodread reviews of it. The issues brought up there drove home the last straw for me, and I stopped reading at the 34% part. It wasn't awful, but I was only mildly curious about what was going to happen next, and the writing/characters were so unenjoyable that I decided to move on to some other book.

Hyper Connection: A Dangerous Game to Play by Luis Robles
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Another day, another (I assume) 'trapped in a VR video game' book. While I was more interested in this story than I was in One Thousand White Women, there were too many typos and grammar issues for me to continue reading. It's too bad, since I was curious about the story -- it seemed like it might go in some different direction than the usual 'trapped in a VR video game' books do. Oh well.

Stopped reading at 19%.

Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 34% + 19% = 53%
Previous abandoned book total: 3%
New total: 53% + 3% = 56%

Currently reading: Saber Tooth (Dawn of Mammals Book 1).

Date: 2017-11-03 03:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)
Hm yeah, I understand why you didn't like that one. I overlooked a lot to let myself enjoy that story. I never bought the idea it was a discovered diary, and I'm not well-versed enough in history to have realized the women acted waay out of character for the times.

Date: 2017-11-03 03:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thistle-chaser.livejournal.com
I'm with you, until I read the Goodread reviews, I hadn't realized how inaccurate it was, but it was more the sex and rape issues that were the last straw for me. Once I read the reviews there, the story seemed more distasteful to me. (Which is why I try to never read reviews until after I'm done!)

Still, I did enjoy most of the beginning of it, so there's that.

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