Izzy

Now, I don't ever write reviews. Usually, I'm more than content to sit back in my chair and reduce a book to the number of stars I give it. Whatever my opinions on any particular book may be, someone's already probably written about it much more articulately than I could have ever hoped, and to a much larger audience, besides.

Sometimes, though, a book will incite such strong feelings in me that I don't feel like a one star rating would suffice. No, I have to sit down on my ass and ramble at the uncaring void of the internet, why, exactly it is that I absolutely, passionately, ardently despise a book.

Oh, man. This book. It's not that I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters or that the writing was absolutely horrendous–quite the contrary! The writing was gorgeous, and the characters–though they felt insufferable, at times–I grew to like. But, Jesus Christ, can anyone in this goddamn book catch a break? The first few times anything bad ever happened, I felt sad. And then bad things just kept happening. And happening. And happening. And happening.

Listen, I get tragedy. I get sad endings and bad things happening. However, when an entire book is literally just one gigantic sobfest piled on top of another sobfest, like it doesn't know how to evoke any other emotion in a reader other than absolute soul-crushing sadness, you really have to stop and think. What frustrates me most is that every now and then, I caught glimpses of something this book could have been. Something well and truly beautiful. But all of it was overshadowed by the ‘hey, let's make something bad happen to this character, again, for the sixtieth time, and make you feel bad.' Also, there's something to be said about how badly all of the gay characters here are treated but if I start on that I'm going to burst a vein or something, and I am not going to die over a book this bad.

Anyways, if tragedy porn is your thing, go ahead!

I'm starting to think the romance genre isn't for me, because my eyes were just glazing over the entirety of this book, except for the existence of the best character in the book—Alex, of course—who I honestly thought would have been the romantic lead, and I'm gonna be honest, would have been way funnier and interesting to me. Then again, I have no idea what people typically like when it comes to romance, and I can see why people would liken this to RWRB. There's that style of writing that some people think is funny and charming but I find vaguely irritating in the way I find white people trying to be funny irritating most of the time, there's the vaguely diverse group of friends that's there, being vaguely diverse (this just being Priya who is Muslim, which is crazy because Priya is as Hindu a name as I can conceive of, but who cares, there've been worse things in life), there's the snarky main character who's biracial (like, French and English, which as I understand might as well be vaguely ethnic to British people) and the uptight blonde dude that's there being sexy and constipated. Interestingly, it also shares a commonality with RWRB in that they both make an off color reference to American imperialism and violence that just jars you, because it reminds you that these books are written for an audience that decidedly excludes people like me and my friends, while also trying to pretend that it isn't. People of color are largely ornamental here, which I'm not disappointed about and I've just sort of expected from books like these written by white queer people—but it feels like there's a difference between knowing this, and seeing it in action. I'm sure this isn't the kind of book where I'm even supposed to care about, because who cares about the optics of representation when two white gay dudes are having a go at each other through fake dating tropes or whatever, and I know these books are largely meant to be escapist fantasies. But what kinds of romance books are people escaping into? Books where (ex?)Muslim South Asians lesbians are just inexplicably hanging out with nobody but white people? Books that make a one-liner out of a war? Again, I'm sure I'm hand wringing over things that nobody cares about but me. But I'm starting to think that books written by white queers and touted as feel-good romance books and escapist fantasies are books that are catered to the kind of person that doesn't want to think about these things, which is a luxury that quite a few people want to enjoy. I won't begrudge them that. But I will wonder.

Anyways, two stars because I really liked Alex♥️

I see a lotta reviews that are like how is it possible that a thirty year old married woman is this attached to her husband or that say something like Katy's love for her mother is so selfish and weird—which I think isn't as anomalous as one might think. I don't know, I found the floundering between cheating and not cheating more disheartening than anything else in the novel, and I think daughters can love their mothers to the point of codependency, and it can be a selfish and short-sighted kind of love. Katy isn't likable, sure, but this isn't a romance novel. I think it's more of a meditation on grief, and even if it felt clumsy at points, I think it was written well enough that I could empathize with that raw and terrible feeling of losing a parent you love. To each their own :P

so I came to the reviews and I was shocked by the amount of people that were like ooooooh the grape scene is soooo visceral and ooooh the cannibalism meanwhile I was just like oh... that was important? i think the book just, from the get-go, desensitized me to like poopenfarten stuff so when those things do happen I had no real reaction. so sick of coming to novels reading 5-star reviews like “this was deeply dark and disturbing” and actually reading the book and finding it boring in its banality

Ending a book with a sex scene gotta be top 10 funniest things ever