Someone Like Me
April 24, 2022 10:25 PM - Subscribe
By the writer of The Girl With All the Gifts. Someone like Me follows the stories of two people who seem, at first, to be quite separate from one another. Both are traumatised by their past.
Liz, a woman with two children, is trying to move on from a violently abusive marriage. Fran, a teenager, was kidnapped when she was a child.
Liz is a kind, gentle person, but she keeps having episodes in which she can't stop herself from behaving in reprehensible ways.
Fran has unexplained gaps in her memory, and she copes by conjuring up an imaginary friend, a mischievous and unpredictable fox girl.
Their lives gradually converge as they face the pain from their past.
This is a extremely violent book from the very first scene. I don't usually enjoy horror or grimly violent stories, but MR Carey has such compassion for his characters that even the most brutal scenes never feel gratuitous.
He writes about trauma and pain, and people struggling to make sense of things. His stories are never cynical. The characters are flawed, but they keep trying to do their best, even when things seem hopeless.
His writing is vivid, and the moments of magic and fantasy are particularly beautiful because of the stark realism of the rest of the story.
I'm not sure what genre best describes this book. It has elements of contemporary fantasy and horror, but it also feels way to real and every day for either of those.
I loved this book so much I didn't want to finish it.
Content warning for explicit scenes of domestic violence.
This is a extremely violent book from the very first scene. I don't usually enjoy horror or grimly violent stories, but MR Carey has such compassion for his characters that even the most brutal scenes never feel gratuitous.
He writes about trauma and pain, and people struggling to make sense of things. His stories are never cynical. The characters are flawed, but they keep trying to do their best, even when things seem hopeless.
His writing is vivid, and the moments of magic and fantasy are particularly beautiful because of the stark realism of the rest of the story.
I'm not sure what genre best describes this book. It has elements of contemporary fantasy and horror, but it also feels way to real and every day for either of those.
I loved this book so much I didn't want to finish it.
Content warning for explicit scenes of domestic violence.
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by kyrademon at 3:22 PM on September 6, 2022