User Profile

This was realistic, magical and thoughtfully written coming of age-story with stunningly honest, complete relationships between realistic and whole characters and very serious and deep thougths around the subject of education, forced goals, ambition and dreams. I truly loved reading an ya book with honest good relationship between the main character and her mother. I also loved the platonic friendships between different sexes, and the very relatable, honest descriptions of social media and the feelings about and around tumblr, youtube and twitter.
The things that bothered me are my opinions as almost-a-30-year-old, who suffered and got frustrated at the escalated drama over things that could have been solved way easier and less painfully if the characters only were feeling tiny bit more secure with their opinions and themselves. To be honest it was mostly very realistic and believable, though. It also seemed like a few chapters towards the end were a bit rushed. The biggest problem for me, though, was how badly Frances was dealing with other's problems, and that the story went on no matter how horrific or blunt questions she asked midst other's crisises. It seemed like a hole in the way the relationships otherwise were built, just for getting the reader to understand something better. It kind of made the realism fell apart.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend this to anyone aged 16-18, as I think they might get a lot out of it.
3,5 stars

(This was the very first audiobook I completed and reviewed!)

Una has woven this story with unbelievable amount of thought, detail and knowledge about everything that's necessary about the subject: trauma and its way of functioning (even the disputable ways it shows), the politics and justice system, the feminist movement, the multiple ways information travel and can be found in different areas, political situations or by different people, sex workers, therapy and other mental health services and the problems within that category, sexuality of young people and the myth about just world, affecting all of our public decision making paths. I absolutely loved the exactness and informativity about each and every subject, and the way they were handled and talked about was simply brilliant.
And yet, all of this information is simplified to its core, reading is paced wonderfully with breathing space whenever needed, and reading is not difficult or heavy at any point.

I don't always like the silent pages with symbolic imagery in graphic novels as I tend to often find them pretentious or somehow out of context, but in this it all made perfect sense, and also brought a lot of emotion into it. The haunting drawings described feelings, thoughts and abstract things like guilt in a way words could have not. Everything included was important and with a purpose.

A perfect graphic novel.

Even though meat industry advertisement and degrading women might often go hand-in-hand, and the common ground of them is an interesting topic to study, I think this book wasn't the one to make the statements.

The Pornography of Meat was polemic and dramatic book, where all of the points, lists and "rules" were based on (horrific) example cases, not studies or numbers. The fast-paced text got really deep into the newly constructed theory before I even realized, and there was barely anything to explain or open it. I think the harshness and the size of the statements really would have needed a little something to back them up, especially when Adams started building a list of patriarchal systems winners and losers, and it was based on her feelings, "advertisements" and "everyone knows".
The emotional writing didn't really help to make the point any clearer either, in fact, the amount of disgusting details and shocking stories of violence felt like cheap stragedy. I had to skip a lot of pages because of nausea.
I unfortunately think this book might make vegetarianism and feminism look irrational and pseudo-intellectual, not something to take seriously. Adams is called vegetarian-feminist theorist, but there are no traces of theory to be found from her book.
The pictures were worth a star, though.