pig // matilde pratesi
first published: 2025 [to be released 01 may] read: 28 march 2025 - 02 april 2025 pages: 332 format: e-book [ARC]
genres: fiction; literary fiction; adult; contemporary favourite character(s): ollie and kai least favourite character(s): valentina first line(s): "the moment i hear the clunk of the lock i spring into action, lifting my bag from under the counter and grabbing the shutter keys." *subject to change
rating: 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑 thoughts: unfortunately, while the premise of pig had me excited to get stuck in, the book as a whole didn't quite work for me in a few ways. the writing style, narrative structure, characterisation and representation are all areas in which i feel it needed some reworking to make it shine. on the face of it, i think this could have been quite amazing, but in its current state i do think these areas keep it from hitting the mark.
let me try and take this step by step, and parse through my thoughts as clearly as possible. to start, the writing style was fine. i didn't fall in love with it, but it worked for what the story was, and did capture the main character, valentina's, internal voice pretty well. it was simplistic, but i think too simplistic to capture some of the emotions on the page, which i think left it feeling a little lacking. for a story covering such dark themes and heavy emotions, it would have been nice to have writing that was more evocative.
i think the narrative structure was a really odd choice. the story is split into three parts, with parts one and three taking place in the present timeline (2019-2020), and part two acting as backstory, taking place in 2012. i have to say, i don't think this structure served the narrative well at all. it was really disengaging to be taken out of the present timeline for a massive context dump. the first part does a decent job of building up some tension, and we are removed from that. and then by part three there's little left to discover, other than how the remainder of the story will unfold. it would have made far more sense to drop pieces of backstory throughout the narrative, allowing us to slowly piece together how vale and clara's relationship came to be the way it is.
in terms of the characters, i liked the supporting characters much more than the main two, vale and clara. ollie and kai were great, and i loved seeing the supportive friendship they gave to vale. i wish we'd gotten a little more of kai! the glimpses we saw of edo were interesting as well. as for clara and vale, i had a harder time reading them. i feel like clara had potential for a far more nuanced take on her character. what made her the way she was, and why did she do what she did? i feel like she was a compulsive liar and a narcissist, but that's just my conclusion. still, we didn't really dig deep into her character, and therefore she felt surface-level and almost like a stock antagonist. the look into the origins of her relationship with vale in part two don't do much to clear this up. why did she single out vale in the first place? did she just want an easy target? she is actually very consistent throughout the story - the growth, or building, of her character between the past and present timelines doesn't really exist. she's pretty much just the same, but more intense. as a result, she doesn't make for a compelling character - she's just a very horrible person.
when it comes to vale, my thoughts are more complex. i found it really, really difficult to sympathise with her character. and this was made all the more difficult by the ambiguity around whether or not she was neurodivergent. i'll come back to that, but taking her character at face value, i didn't enjoy reading her. as a potential disclaimer, i have a hard time reading characters with very low self-esteem, and vale's is cripplingly so. i can say straight up that that did no favours with how much i liked the character. but on top of that, her thoughts are very repetitive, and quite juvenile. sometimes her decisions came across as nonsensical or poorly thought through. i think the characters were meant to be in their late 20s but she didn't come across that way.
and the alluded to neurodivergence made it difficult to tell if my thoughts on her character were justified. vale is hyper-fixated on pigs, and she sometimes struggles with understanding social cues. it's never explicitly stated that she is perhaps somewhere on the spectrum, but it is alluded to. but, i feel like this is a weak characterisation if so? if she is on the spectrum, i feel like i would have appreciated the character more if this was developed in a deeper way. it feels like the two most stereotypical symptoms of autism were picked out and used to base her personality around, and if she was truly supposed to represent a character on the spectrum then it was a bit wishy washy. i just think a lot more could have been done if this was approached better. and it may be a continuation of the issue of poor characterisation that clara suffered from. was what i didn't like about her character a result of a poorly written neurodiverse character, or was she just a badly written character? i am not on the spectrum, or closely know anyone who is, but it just didn't feel quite right, considering neurodiverse viewpoints are lacking in literature.
so, all in all, pig didn't work for me unfortunately. it was a good premise, with some moments of lovely writing and a great supporting cast, but i felt it needed some restructuring and stronger characters. massive thanks to Corsair and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review!