Book Thoughts: Private Rites by Julia Armfield (2024)

Too short. That’s all.

Okay fine, I will expound on my thoughts slightly, since you all clearly want them.

Set in a near future where Britain is in constant rain and most low lands have flooded, Private Rites follows three sisters when their famous and rich architect father has dies. Really good drawing of how different all of the sisters are and how they come apart and together in relation to each other. But, none of the three sisters, in all their wild and beautiful lives, seems to have a singular friend. They only have their romantic partner, their recently deceased father, and, in one of the sisters’ cases, an employee. I know we are living in an isolated world (and this world is significantly more isolated) but it is so hard for me to latch onto a story where the characters walk through the world with no evidence of their past or attachments or the community at large around them. (This is not quite true, the characters do engage with the world around them, but it is not in a way that I found as immersive as it could have been, or as true to life. To me, it seemed like there were only these characters because that was the most convenient for the story, which made it feel a bit vacuous.)

This is one of those books that takes a genre setting and then focuses on (for lack of a better word) literary fiction subjects. This results in an underdeveloped world building that I find extremely unsatisfying. Everything included was compelling just … GIVE ME MORE. Let’s get to know this world that we’re in for more than 200 pages!

There are vague mentions of new cults popping up every so often throughout the narrative and, shocking, I really would have loved to see more about them. Especially because of the way it ended, which could have been really cool but just didn’t feel satisfying enough for me.

Final thoughts are that i’ve decided that it should be illegal for a movie to be over 3 hours long and for a book to be fewer than 300 pages. 1

Longer books and shorter movies please! This is what I’m manifesting.