Wren
“I don’t want to be funny”—Audrey’s mum was wearing an unmistakably parental expression—“but have you ever considered trying to get with a girl who isn’t completely horrible?”
This concludes the trilogy of loosely interlinked contemporary fiction books marketed for some incomprehensible reason as romcoms. Actually, compared to the first two this one is the most romance-like, though it still doesn’t hit the right beats for a romcoms, but it still leans “chick lit” (much as I’m meh on that term) with the romantic plot line being there to support the character study. I’m wondering if it would have landed differently if this was a dual POV. Especially since in the previous books Jennifer was the antagonist/as close to a villain as a story focused around the fictional equivalent of The Great British Bake Off. So when a character like that is moved into the LI position, you kind of want to get into their head to properly see them from a new angle, you know?
Though the funny thing is, by the end of the book even without getting Jennifer’s POV I kind of warmed up to her. She never stopped being horrible to people, but she did reveal some interesting depths. So while I never got truly sold on the romance, it was more because of Audrey, whom I greatly enjoyed as her own character! But she was just *so* hung up on her ex the entire time, to the point of having conversations with her in her head. Early in the book, it was somewhat tolerable, but the further in we got, the more I felt like any kind of relationship this character was currently capable of would be a rebound. Like, she was still having to actively swat away thoughts of her ex while intimate with Jennifer 94% into the book. So yeah, maybe dual POV actually wouldn’t have fixed anything here.
I did really enjoy the individual character arcs. Audrey grew so much over the course of the story, from someone entirely too polite for her own good to someone with a much more confident approach to life. I also really enjoyed all the budding intergenerational friendships: Audrey and Alanis, Audrey and Doris, Jennifer and Grace (though that last one can’t be called budding, I suppose). The parallel storyline with Doris’s past was an interesting addition, though also one it took me a bit to get into. I guess I was making the mistake of trying to appreciate it for its own sake and balking at how awful Emily was, but once I started treating it as a narrative device meant to explore *Audrey’s* approach to relationships, it got a lot easier to bear.
Tangentially, I was a big fan of all the pokes at how life becomes a narrative, the differences between what happened and how it was framed, etc. That was an interesting angle, and I think pursuing it made the book structurally stronger. Alexis Hall can be very all-over-the-place with constructing his plots at times—I think our minds work quite similarly in that way, so I fully empathize. I’ve noticed there’s a lot more clarity in the novels he writes with a specific theme/lens that is “on” all the time.
Overall, I had a much better time than I expected, which is always a good feeling to have when you finish a book, if you ask me. I’d say I’m excited to see what the author does next, but you know what, while I totally am, maybe I shouldn’t look up his new releases just yet. Maybe I should first work through the parts of his backlog that are still on my TBR.
“I don’t want to be funny”—Audrey’s mum was wearing an unmistakably parental expression—“but have you ever considered trying to get with a girl who isn’t completely horrible?”
This concludes the trilogy of loosely interlinked contemporary fiction books marketed for some incomprehensible reason as romcoms. Actually, compared to the first two this one is the most romance-like, though it still doesn’t hit the right beats for a romcoms, but it still leans “chick lit” (much as I’m meh on that term) with the romantic plot line being there to support the character study. I’m wondering if it would have landed differently if this was a dual POV. Especially since in the previous books Jennifer was the antagonist/as close to a villain as a story focused around the fictional equivalent of The Great British Bake Off. So when a character like that is moved into the LI position, you kind of want to get into their head to properly see them from a new angle, you know?
Though the funny thing is, by the end of the book even without getting Jennifer’s POV I kind of warmed up to her. She never stopped being horrible to people, but she did reveal some interesting depths. So while I never got truly sold on the romance, it was more because of Audrey, whom I greatly enjoyed as her own character! But she was just *so* hung up on her ex the entire time, to the point of having conversations with her in her head. Early in the book, it was somewhat tolerable, but the further in we got, the more I felt like any kind of relationship this character was currently capable of would be a rebound. Like, she was still having to actively swat away thoughts of her ex while intimate with Jennifer 94% into the book. So yeah, maybe dual POV actually wouldn’t have fixed anything here.
I did really enjoy the individual character arcs. Audrey grew so much over the course of the story, from someone entirely too polite for her own good to someone with a much more confident approach to life. I also really enjoyed all the budding intergenerational friendships: Audrey and Alanis, Audrey and Doris, Jennifer and Grace (though that last one can’t be called budding, I suppose). The parallel storyline with Doris’s past was an interesting addition, though also one it took me a bit to get into. I guess I was making the mistake of trying to appreciate it for its own sake and balking at how awful Emily was, but once I started treating it as a narrative device meant to explore *Audrey’s* approach to relationships, it got a lot easier to bear.
Tangentially, I was a big fan of all the pokes at how life becomes a narrative, the differences between what happened and how it was framed, etc. That was an interesting angle, and I think pursuing it made the book structurally stronger. Alexis Hall can be very all-over-the-place with constructing his plots at times—I think our minds work quite similarly in that way, so I fully empathize. I’ve noticed there’s a lot more clarity in the novels he writes with a specific theme/lens that is “on” all the time.
Overall, I had a much better time than I expected, which is always a good feeling to have when you finish a book, if you ask me. I’d say I’m excited to see what the author does next, but you know what, while I totally am, maybe I shouldn’t look up his new releases just yet. Maybe I should first work through the parts of his backlog that are still on my TBR.