Bookish and the Beast

i really liked the first two books in this series so the fact that this book is so exceptionally mediocre, bordering on full on bad, is just such a disappointment.

i wasn't expecting the amount of lgbt+ rep in this book which i guess was a nice surprise (all 3 major male characters are queer and one major character is non-binary) but then that was paired by the most stereotypical character archetypes that it probably cancelled out anything good. fyi, there is a latinx character in this and to show that they're latinx they're constantly cooking (tamales, enchiladas etc.) and the only spanish they use in the entire book is ‘dios mio' and ‘mijo'......yeah.

other than poor characterisation, the main characters in this book had ZERO romantic chemistry. i didn't feel it once in this. they meet and fall in love in one night without knowing who the other person is, not exchanging names or numbers, anything like that (totally believable) and then they meet through a convoluted ‘meet cute' and are forced to spend one month together reorganising a private library??? and of course they fall in love all over again within that month because why not? the problem isn't so much the timeline of the book, but that it takes about three interactions for them to fall in love and none of it feels real or believable. i just didn't get it.

other things that niggled included how obvious the batb characters were in this, the near constant references to things and how vance doesn't recognise how privileged he is at any point in this.

tl;dr: pop culture references + underdeveloped characters + basic beauty and the beast retelling = this book