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Review: Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maybe if we could just picture our enemies jerking off once in a while, the world would be a better place.

This was a really wild journey that I was not prepared to embark on. All I wanted was an audiobook to listen to post-surgery since my eyes are not currently 100% functional at the moment, but boy was this more than I bargained for.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock is a book about the day a suicidal boy decides he's going to kill his former best friend and then himself in a murder suicide. Throughout the book we slowly learn about his life and what has driven him to arrive at his current state. I literally had zero idea what this book was about when I downloaded it from my library's Overdrive, I just remembered a bunch of people praising it at some point, and that's why I picked it. This is really not the most uplifting book at all, and in hindsight not really the best pick for my current predicament.

Since the narrator wants to die, he often talks about the pointlessness of life and why the future is full of nothing but sadness and how nothing will ever get better. As someone who at some point also really wanted to die, but who has since found new reason and will to live, reading this was some type of ride let me tell you. He really did seem to make valid points from time to time which isn't really what someone like me needs to hear. But then there were parts that put hope back in that made everything feel better again, for me at least, if not as much for the narrator. (view spoiler) It was at this point I had to pause to myself and I said, "This is a really good book."

It's really generally not a depressing book, but if you're someone who has never experienced negative feelings like this you might find it depressing to see how far people can fall, because it is all super realistic. But for someone like me it just felt really accurate and relatable, and it really resonated with me. It also definitely has its funny moments and made me chuckle out loud a few times, which is actually bad because I'm not allowed to laugh in my current state, whoops.

In regards to the audiobook, it was fantastic. It was narrated by Noah Galvin and he did a really great job. His voice fitted the character and actually sounded the correct age, and his acting was some of that real good shit. This female voice is alarmingly accurate, too. This is an audiobook I would actually recommend.

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