A review by safiya
Real Life by Brandon Taylor

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I’ve been putting off reading this for a while, largely because Brandon Taylor is one of my all time favourite tweeters, twitterers..? He does good, lengthy tweets about so many things I love (books, stationary, Autumn, terrible adaptations of classic novels..) that I was concerned this wouldn’t live up to my expectations. 

Luckily it completely did, Real Life is an engrossing, yet discomforting story, exploring the distance we put between ourselves and others, Blackness in academia and feeling lost. Taylor’s writing is incredibly confident, yet tender; I so often felt the weight of main character Wallace’s struggles and the things he left unsaid.

I’m so happy that I finally read this, it’s definitely one of my favourites that I’ve read this year. As seems to be a consistent theme of my reading, I’d recommend this to those who like something character driven (where the characters more often than not struggle to communicate and drive things forward).
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