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A timely and harrowing reflection on surviving through the climate crisis, PRIVATE RITES reminds the reader of the importance of community, family, and continuing to live amidst existential and more domestic layers of chaos. I think this is a novel that will continue to bloom in the minds of others as time goes on, and we continue to live past the estimated "points of no return" and continue to ravage our resources with the proliferation of AI tools--tons of food for thought, but don't let the churn of capitalism or existential dread weigh you down. Thank you again to Flatiron and Netgalley for the ARC :)

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I knew what I was coming back to — it’s another book from the author that absolutely delivers on being moody and melancholy, and I’m so there for it, because it places women right in the center and with so much nuance to their emotional palette. Loved it.

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Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

Disclaimer: I know nothing about King Lear, other than the fact that the guy has three daughters, so my review will be written without taking into consideration the source material.

Not gonna lie, I sort of struggled with this one. This is a relatively short read, a little under 300 pages, but it took me nearly a week to complete this book. ( I typically finish 300 pages in 2 or 3 days.) I think the main reason for this is that the pacing is slow. Like, really slow. There's not a lot of plot going on, and for the most part, we follow our three main characters going about their day to day lives.

A large focus is on the relationship between the sisters and their parents (or lack thereof). I really resonated with the portrayal of their sibling relationship; there were moments that felt like the author had written down the exact thoughts and feelings I've had about my own siblings. (Although me and my siblings definitely get along better.) The trio's relationship with their parents is less focused upon, but impossible to ignore, especially with the tension caused by their father's death.

The speculative setting feels ever more timely; the city they live in is being gradually submerged by rising waters, which has become so normal that the constant rain and ferry rides is just another aspect of their lives. I loved the sections in between the main story entitled The City; it shows what is going on outside of the main characters and gives the story a different perspective.

This book really captures how boring it is living through the end times. (I hate that this is relatable.) There is a underlying tension caused by the ever-present rain and gradually increasing flooding, but the characters still have to go to work and do chores. The story isn't entirely miserable; Agnes finds love amidst all the mundanity, and it is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ke Huy Quan's character says "In another life, I would have loved doing laundry and taxes with you." I think this sentiment captures Agnes's relationship with Stephanie completely.

I sort of forgot that this is supposed to be a horror novel; aside from a few weird moments plus the overall creepy vibe, this book read more as lit fic than horror. Towards the end, however, the horror elements kick into full gear. There is a huge tonal shift that I am not sure I like? It felt out of place with the rest of the narrative. Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see how the ending fits in with the overall/rest of the book.

Other than the ending, this book as a whole is gorgeous and lyrical and relatable, and will definitely be staying with me for some time.

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This was a highly anticipated read and it started very reminiscent of Blue Sisters with the themes of sisterhood and grief. It eventually led to something else but it did take a while to get there. I do think the commentary is interesting but it didn't work as well as Our Wives Under the Sea worked for me.

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Julia Armfied once again stuns with a deft mix of literary fiction and horror. The characters and family relationships shine against an uncanny backdrop of a world nearly underwater. The main characters deal with a drowning society while trying to keep afloat of their own dark secrets and family struggles. Run don't walk to read this book.

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confession: i had to start and stop this one no less than five or six times. at one point, i was 75% of the way through and had to start over because i had no idea what was going on.

this book is about three sisters: irene, isla, and agnes. they've just been told that their father has died.

i think that i was very much put off of this book from the beginning when isla, a therapist, talks about dealing with her patients and nicknaming them atrocious things while in session with them. a therapist mentally referring to a patient as "ugly knuckles" - okay? though i understand that therapists are human beings, i'm not truly sure what this sort of narration about her served.

i grew even more frustrated with the interactions between sisters. both older sisters are hostile and mean toward baby sister agnes, born of a different mother. when they're not being unnecessarily cruel and dismissive of each other, they were constantly at each other's throats. there was a scene that recapped an incident prior to their father's death when he was hospitalized. one of the sisters says, "it's good that you've actually managed to show up," and is completely baffled when the other sister is upset by the way she expressed this information. it was weird and mean.

some things i think were done well: there was the inclusion of nb characters without any discussion. i loved that there was so much queerness in the book, also.

armfield also really does a great atmosphere. she painted this drowning world so viscerally that i felt like i was there.

i wasn't a huge fan of the ending. it felt abrupt, it felt like a hurried, unplanned inclusion. i didn't really get it. perhaps i'll enjoy it more if i reread it after rereading the book it was based on.

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Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Julia Armfield's Private Rites follows the lives of three sisters as they deal with grief and love. It is a tale of familial relationships, queer love, and how people react when they are faced with the end of the world.

My feelings on this book are completely mixed. There were many things I liked about this book, but quite a few that I disliked as well.

I was originally interested in this book because it is a reimagining of King Lear. I loved the King Lear elements of this book. It was a creative and intriguing take on the original story. Armfield mastered the reimaging aspect. It's a wonderfully unique story that takes some of the elements I loved about King Lear and weaves them into this new story in such a beautiful way.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the writing in this book. There were some chapters where I was completely in love with the writing and some where I wasn't sure I actually enjoyed it. The way Armfield can discuss grief and relationships is incredible. She takes these deep topics and puts them onto the page in a way so many people would never be able to do. Specifically with the topic of grief, she handled it in a way I had never read before. I always love to see how different authors discuss grief, and this may be one of my favorite depictions of it. It's clear throughout this book that Armfield is a talented writer.

Another thing I loved about this story is the fact that we got the city's point of view. It was such an intriguing addition to the story and one I hadn't seen before. It added another level of depth to the story that I absolutely adored.

There were some elements of the storytelling in this book that I didn't love. My main issue is that a lot of this book didn't feel like much of a story was being told. As I got further into the book, the sister's thoughts and actions got more and more repetitive. I was excited at the beginning because they all had such interesting personalities and dynamics with each other. Unfortunately, it felt like you never got to know them any better. I kept thinking that we'd get a deeper look into their personalities, but they eventually began to feel one-dimensional.

My other issue with the book was how the end of the world aspect was handled. I love a slower story, but not when a seemingly major plot point only feels relevant for the last 50-100 pages. There are brief hints to it throughout the story, but it doesn't play much of a role until the very end. When we did get to it, I thought it was written in a beautiful, interesting way. However, I would have liked it to be more important for more of the book.

Although my feelings toward this book were changing so much from chapter to chapter, I can look back on it now and see that I mostly enjoyed it. I didn't connect to the story as much as I would have liked to, but I'm still glad I read it. This has convinced me that I need to read more of Julia Armfield's stories.

Review on Goodreads (sophreadingbooks https://www.goodreads.com/sophreadingbooks) as of 11/27/2024
Review on Instagram (sophiesreading https://www.instagram.com/sophiesreading/) expected 12/10/2024

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Private Rites, just like Armfield's Our Wives, didn't quite hit it for me. Both books I've given 3 stars because they are readable, incredibly unique, and the writing is nice, but fell short. In both books I struggled to connect with the characters and care much for them. They all seem one-dimensional and I had a hard time remembering which sister was which. I found the ending to be so out of left field and bizarre.

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The Carmichael sisters don’t like each other. They hate their famous architect father. One could argue that they’re not that fond of themselves, either. All of this simmering loathing makes Julia Armfield’s Private Rites a challenging read. Challenging, yes, but understandable. What I don’t understand is that Armfield decided to set this family drama in a world drowning in endless rain and to populate it with a mysterious cult that follows the youngest Carmichael sister around. I’m going to keep an eye out for other reviews of this book that can, hopefully, help me figure this out.

Oldest sister Isla works as a therapist. Ever since she was a little girl, with her cold, combative father and increasingly mentally ill mother, Isla was the one who kept things organized. Consequently, she can be a bit patronizing and far too concerned about appearances. Her younger sister, Irene, is the angry one. She resents everyone and everything, it seems. Talking to her is a minefield of perceived insults. Youngest sister Agnes is a cipher, though her sisters seem to think she’s a flake. Agnes’s phone is never on and she runs from anything that might tie her down.

The sisters take turns telling us their stories. I was glad for this because their inner thoughts were much more illuminating than their spiteful conversations with each other in the wake of their father’s death. The sisters reveal scenes from their childhood that show us exactly why they detest their father and why only his death could bring them back together, at the house he built to stay above rising water. Isla, as usual, is trying to observe the niceties while Irene lashes out reflexively. Agnes is mostly a ghost, though I can’t blame her for this given how fraught her sisters’ relationship is.

Some books stand out to me not because of their characters or their plot but because of the mood they invoke. Private Rites, to me, is a mood book. That mood is a blend of frustration and despair. (There may be a German word for this.) Everyone knows that the time to fix the environment is long past. Nothing can ever be normal again. But no one is doing anything: not the government, not the corporations, not the people themselves. People still go to work, even if they have to use ferries and water taxis and their homes are increasingly flooding out. It’s hard to say if hardly anyone is trying to fix things or even adapt much to life on a watery planet because they think it’s someone else’s problem to fix or if they’re out of ideas.

I suppose the environmental catastrophe is a metaphor for how so many people refuse to change and just play out the roles they’re used to playing. (I’m still not sure what the point of the cult is yet.) What I don’t understand is why Private Rites has both psychodrama and environmental catastrophe (and a cult). The family drama was interesting and comprehensible; it didn’t need the heavy underscoring of the water. The flooded world thing is interesting, too, but didn’t need family drama to overshadow it (and possibly reduce its effect to metaphor).

Bookish folk, if you read this book and understand it, please let me know what I’m overlooking.

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A really interesting plot and a great first half of this novel, but the storyline did not set up the ending for me and left me confused. I wished there was more "dread" in the story to match up with the ending. I loved the introduction of the sisters and learning who they were and who their partners were, but then things got boring, and the ending threw me off guard. It felt like reading a separate book. Books about family dynamics, and specifically sisters, always intrigue me, but this left me wanting so much more.

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2.5 stars

I love _King Lear_. I also thoroughly enjoyed my last read from Armfield. Unfortunately, this most recent effort just did not work for me.

Three sisters deal with the death of their father and the challenging memories they have that precede that death. Readers also get some insight into each sister because of multi-perspective narration. The trouble for me was that what they were thinking, saying, and doing was not interesting enough to help me get invested in any one of them, let alone all three.

I came into this book thinking it'd be an understated favorite of the year, and I'm completing the listen (I went for the audiobook after not being able to get beyond the first section in the e-book for a bit too long) knowing that this could've really been DNF under slightly different circumstances. I'll give this author another chance, of course, but this one fell flat for me.

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2.5 - 3 stars maybe? “Mundane Apocalypse” as a description is fitting, but that is not my issue with this book. I like the mundane, quiet version of what the end of this world looks like. I liked the depictions of rain and flood and what it looks like to try and outrun these issues. The horror that was promised comes only at the very end, while the rest of the novel focuses on 3 sisters in the aftermath of their father’s death.

Normally this wouldn’t bother me. I love sticky family dynamics and prickly characters. But unfortunately these sisters felt so entirely bland to me. And the majority of the novel just follows them around while they think bland thoughts and hold on to anger at each other for things they couldn’t control. It just didn’t make for the most interesting reading experience.

Nobody can deny Armfield’s writing power, though. I just think this may have been a bit unbalanced.

I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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3.5 rounded up! julia armfield has once again done a masterclass in writing about grief and loss- though very different types of relationships than Our Wives Under the Sea. this book is written with multiple POVs including the “City,” which highlights the underlying horror. besides that, i feel as though the premise and literary horror did not come through til the end. so interested in the end though!! lots of unanswered questions like her previous novel. (time to read reddit theories and author interviews)

the POVs of the sisters were hard to keep straight at first, especially Irene as her own entity. on a personal level, i wish i paid more attention when i read king lear in high school.

thanks netgalley and flatiron books for the eArc! out in the US on Dec 3rd!

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I absolutely loved Julia Armfield's short story collection Salt Slow, but unfortunately that didn't carry over to Private Rites.

Armfield is a stunning writer; there's no doubt about that. But my goodness this just bored me so much. I think the three POVs was too much. I get that they were probably necessary for the story, but I couldn't care about all of them. I kept mixing up the two *I* sisters, and I was really only interested in Agnes. But even that wasn't enough to sustain my interest.

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As I write this review, it is raining — and the rain has been pretty much constant for the past 24 hours. It feels something like kismet to have encountered Julia Armfield’s new novel, Private Rights, in such an environment. Set in the midst of a perpetually rainy and unnamed city, Armfield’s novel follows sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes as they grapple with the loss of their estranged father, personal upheaval, and a world that’s as hauntingly mundane as it is apocalyptic. An atmospheric science fiction retelling of King Lear, the novel interrogates themes of family, memory, and love in a doomed world.

My favorite thing about Private Rights is the way it examines the gap between personal and global grief, and the oft-complex ethics of having your own problems when the world is actively dying around you. The apocalypse doesn’t mean that you stop fighting with your family, stop dealing with the legal drudgery of death and divorce, stop falling in love — it just adds a new, complicated layer to the mix. As someone who has often struggled with the reality of private and public grief, I enjoyed the way Armfield uses these issues in her novel.

If you enjoyed the moody, slow-burn horror of Armfield’s 2022 hit Our Wives Under The Sea, you won’t be disappointed by Private Rights — the way the novel builds to its climax with a slow, creeping dread was a delight to experience. The novel’s pacing is wonderfully slow, like a pot of delicious and creepy stew set at a perfect simmer. I adore Armfield’s take on cosmic horror, where the state of things is impossible to wrap your head around in its magnitude, desolation, and inevitability. If you’re looking for a novel that effectively captures the horror of climate change, look no further.

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin argues that science fiction is “descriptive” rather than “predictive.” In Private Rights, Julia Armfield is not predicting the end of the world so much as describing the ways in which we are already reacting to the catastrophes around us. Despite that, Private Rights is not at all a hopeless book. In Armfield’s world, reconciliation is always a possibility, and love is no less life-altering, even in the ruins of society. The world of Private Rights is doomed, but it is still breathing.

Private Rights by Julia Armfield is out on December 3rd, 2024 in the United States, and available for pre-order wherever you purchase books. Many thanks to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for providing this e-gally!

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I loved Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield's first novel and one of my favorite novels of the last few years, and fans of Our Wives should also love Private Rites. Armfield's writing is a haunting, lyrical mix of literary and horror that slides between reality and the supernatural. Private Rites is a story that moves around climate fiction, family drama (particularly a sister story), and queer relationships--as well as a reimagining of King Lear. This is a hard book to otherwise talk about or explain, and it's really one to be experienced. Armfield is a special, distinctive writer and I can't wait to see what she does next.

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If you enjoyed the experience of Armfield's Our Wives Under The Sea, I think you're going to like/love this one as well. Again, we have lots of water. Just so much water. I bet you can guess why...that's right, climate change! It's an, "I can certainly see things ending up like this in a few years" scenario.
The writing is just amazing. You can just feel the dampness and smell the mildew. The characters are interesting and pretty flawed TBH. I do wish we'd had more time with some of the secondary characters, but I seem to say that a lot. Three queer sisters that don't get along and suffer from a lack of parental love, make for some complicated relationships. A nice representation of LGBTQIA+ in cli-fi with a side of horror.
Then there's the ending. I just don't even know what to say because I don't want to spoil anything. It's quite a shock though. One that will probably have you rereading the book for missed clues. It's good though-so good!
#NetGalley

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I think this book changed me as a person.

Since her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, and her debut short story collection, Salt Slow, Julia Armfield has quickly become a favorite author of mine and an inspiration in terms of her writing. I was worried I wasn’t going to love Private Rites as much as her debut novel, but I was wrong.

Private Rites is an immersive and complex novel, a retelling of King Lear, centered on three sisters and the repercussions they face after the death of their father.

Julia Armfield’s newest novel focuses on various themes - such as family dysfunction and love - but she writes her books in a way that it is haunting and creeps up on you.

I loved it, and I can’t wait for the audiobook!

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This is my first book by this author, and I wasn't sure what to expect. In terms of the "end of the world" story I expected, this was MUCH more quiet and subtle than I assumed. The writing is beautifully eloquent, and it's obvious that the author is skilled at character work. While this story is an atmospheric look at grief, sisterhood, and the queer existence, it just wasn't all that entertaining for me. The best way that I can explain it is that I felt like I was watching this story instead of being immersed in it.

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Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an early copy for review.

Audio: the audio narration is very good!

Review: I wanted to like this book so much. I really enjoyed the premise and the idea that the world is getting more and more rain, there was an undertone of climate change and taking care of the earth. Before I dive in, I did not finish this book, I do think I might come back to it much later in life. However, for now I wanted to share my thoughts. I had a hard time connecting to the characters. They shifted and changed too much and at times were hard to tell apart. They have distinctly different lives however, a lot of the details and traits of each character I had a very hard time figuring out who was who and what I should be gaining from their interactions. Because of that, it greatly decreased my enjoyment. I know that this author is supposed to be a very powerful lit fic writer and I don't doubt that's true. However, I had a hard time getting the depth of this novel and I"m really not sure if that's a me problem or not. I generally enjoy hard hitting, slower pace and at times weird stories. Something was very much a miss with this for me... for now.

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