Cassandra Reads

posted an update4 months ago

4 months ago

2.5 stars A meandering navel-gazing screed with only a few saving graces. Replete with standalone facts and philosophical threads meant to place reader and writer in an exploration of the pagan Green Man grounded in the christian traditional foundations of the past in geographic space, these threads became the most interesting part of the book, not as a tapestry they made interwoven with the author's own discoveries, but as standalone moments to build a "To Read" bibliography. The narrative overall was rambling and disorientated, constantly centring back on the author, who simply is not interesting, not insightful, not offering up anything beyond self indulgence. Nowhere is this more salient than the overflowing ever expanding landscape descriptions that only served to disconnect the narrative and functioned, particularly as they began to recur and recur, only to distract. Descriptions that the structural editor in me suspects were intended to do the precise opposite. What is this book about? What has it discovered or concluded? How was the journey (literal as described and figurative as the reader) relevant, insightful, or important? These questions were not only not answered, they do not even seem to have been asked. If you have a particular interest in the concept of the Green Man philosophically and historically then this book's citations make for good reading. I did find a number of interesting ideas, but none of them were the author's. Declined from 3.5 stars to 2.5 stars because of the author's stigmatizing and ableist approach to discussing mental illness as an outside observer. She chose to minimize, romanticize, even dismisss the very real and serious suffering of the mentally ill, all in the name of her own intellectual wishcasting self indulgence. I found it all very distasteful.

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About me

I am Cassandra, an avid and educated reader. I did my Masters in Publishing in 2013-14 and have worked in and around the publishing industry ever since. I am an artist, poet, book reviewer, strategic marketing consultant, and editor, specializing in structural, substantive, and stylistic editing.