Somewhere around the halfway mark the slut shaming in this one -already distasteful- ramped up to eleven thousand and it just keeps going like that.
Everybody calls Idrys a whore and it's not in a 'funny' joking way, no they're all serious. That's how they think of him, so much so it seems to be the first term they use to describe him. His friends, lovers, roommates, his supposedly loving and supportive sister (who frankly, I think is a horrible bitch.) Trystan calls him a whore while trying to convince Idrys to go out with him!
And it's just feeling more and more oppressive and hateful and no wonder Idrys has emotional issues, if this is the kind of support his family and friends offer him.
I searched my kindle and 'whore' is used 22 times, now one of those is a joint insult to Idrys and his sister both though it's said directly to him, along the lines of 'you're an even bigger whore than your sister' though I'm not bothering to go find the exact words. But other than that in all the other incidents I read it was used exclusively against Idrys and I'm betting that trend continues 'til the end. And that's just the times the word was used, there were plenty of other interactions that just implied it and the accompanying moral judgment that went along with it.
What makes it all especially distasteful is knowing that Idrys was violently sexually assaulted as a teen, in fact that was his first experience with sex. And gosh maybe making him feel bad for how he reacted to that isn't the most helpful thing to do? And yet this is how the people who love him respond, by labeling him a whore, because he reacted to the rape by sleeping around. The whole thing is leaving such an awful taste in my mouth I'm having a really hard time seeing any possible outcome for the story that could redeem it after being subjected to pages and pages of that message.
I'm about half a paragraph from wishing the whole lot of them (aside from Idrys and maybe his childhood friend Theo who hasn't done anything yet) would be stung to death by wasps and jellyfish just so Ide could get away from all these people who seem perfectly happy to think he is nothing but a whore and even happier to make sure he knows it and believes it about himself as well.
Maybe this constantly calling someone a whore is a British thing I've never seen before and it's not meant to be as hateful as it reads for me. Or some sort of cultural quirk that I'm just missing. Or maybe it's just that awful.
Aaaannd after writing that I'm having a hard time seeing why I'd want to go back and try to finish it. Think this can go in the DNF.
