Lu Clark
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Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 16
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 16
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense
- By Lu Clark on 03-15-25
- Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense
Reviewed: 03-15-25
It is rare that I ever truly detest a book. I like to keep an open mind and am able to enjoy a wide variety of different writing styles on the basis of their own merits, and I’m typically the person in my book club who looks for things to like about a book even if it wasn’t my personal favorite. So my nearly-immediate hatred of this book actually shocked me.
The writing style of Parade is self-indulgent to an extreme, abandoning any plot development or even sense of linearity in time in favor of an insufferable spiral of obsessive navel-gazing about gender and fine art. There is something to be said about how this sort of obsession could form in the deeply misogynist culture that we come from, but in 2025 I have a very difficult time relating to any languishing self-victimizing narrative coming from the perspective of a successful white woman (both within the fiction and from the author). Misogyny is very much real and worthy of discussion, but anyone who blames every single minuscule aspect of their suffering in life on gender politics is imprisoning themselves more than anyone else ever could.
Given that the perspective on gender and sex in this book seems rooted in second-wave feminism at best I was stunned to learn just before writing this review that it was released in 2024… and then I wasn’t, when I remembered the current state of gender politics in Britain and how prominent voices like JK Rowling have shaped the narrative of misogyny to revolve solely around the biological processes of people assigned female at birth. Reality is not so simple. It is regressive, depressing and inaccurate to reduce the experiences and marginalizations of all of womankind solely to this concept of a childbearing nature. Please let women be more than that.
And as a side note, the fine art discussion also calls to mind parodies of art critics where the critic turns every single image they see into a confirmation of their own preexisting worldview, turning every little thing into a deep commentary about some philosophy of life that the writer carries. I am an artist myself; while analysis does have its place, sometimes a painting really is just a damn painting.
Narrator was fine, nothing exceptional about the performance. To be fair it’s hard to be exceptional when you’re given source material as dull as this.
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Home Before Dark
- A Novel
- By: Riley Sager
- Narrated by: Cady McClain, Jon Lindstrom
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,689
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5,086
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5,079
Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His horror memoir of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity — and skepticism.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Meh...Not My Favorite Sager Book
- By Teethnclaws on 06-30-20
- Home Before Dark
- A Novel
- By: Riley Sager
- Narrated by: Cady McClain, Jon Lindstrom
Scared the sh** out of me
Reviewed: 10-27-22
To start with: the narration was well done, but in particular I want to praise the work of the woman who voices the modern day parts. Her emotional intonation, well-defined character voices, the pacing during the scary scenes, all of it was top notch. I’d love to seek out more books she’s narrated in the future.
As for the book itself, it was my Halloween read for this year and I spent the first maybe 50% of the book wholly unimpressed by how un-spooky it was. Lots of attempts at building tension that seemed a bit empty and cheesy to me because I felt like they couldn’t possibly all pay off. Then I spent the final 15% of the book feeling like I was on an increasingly intense rollercoaster with my face eventually getting ripped off by the g-forces. By the time I hit the climax of the book I was yelling “OH NO OH GOD” out loud to no one at 2am.
11/10, thanks for unlocking my new fear of armoires Todd.
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