Poemsia

One day I'll finish reading this book (I've stopped at halfway through over a year ago because it's so bad) but for now 0/10 would not recommend, equally cringey as sad girls. Not being intentionally mean; I enjoyed all her poetry books before her fiction attempts.

I will say though that not only does it feel like the biggest cop-out to never include any of Verity's “god-tier” level writing (but I get it, taste is subjective) but to then have scenes like when she first reads her poetry to a group and it goes like “I started reading my poetry, I was so scared and nervous, but everyone gasped the entire time and by the end everyone was crying and applauding me saying they'd never heard anything so beautiful” especially as this reads entirely as a self-insert fanfic.

Also the amount of complaints about the ‘haters' who ‘hate-review' books just to be mean is clearly Lang being triggered and offended that people don't like her fiction books. Get over yourself.


MY DRAFTED REVIEW FROM WHILE I WAS READING:

“I hated everything about this book. Nothing about it works. The characters are unrelatable but also unbelievable. No one has any depth at all.”
- The opening to my review for Sad Girls, which also applies here.

This book is trash and let me tell you why. If you're a normal sane person and you also read Sad Girls, you understand. This book is the same. I might be all over the place but there's just so much crap.

Spoilers ahead.

Poemsia is a book about a girl who writes poetry and works in a bookstore. We're supposed to believe her poetry is the holy grail of anything ever written, yet we're conveniently never shown anything she writes. I understand this could be because taste is subjective, but it still just feels like a cop out. Also we're supposed to believe that the bookstore she works at is “the last one in Sydney that still has a poetry section” and honestly, this entire book is too full of itself.

Just like the main character in Sad Girls, Verity Wolf is very aloof and unaware of reality and gets everything handed to her, completely unrealistically. She idolizes this one poet who got famous by being discovered through some site. Her best friend Jessica says things like “you could be famous too, your poetry is better!” and then decides to take on the role of publicist, gathering Verity's poems, and putting them together in the form of a physical book with a beautiful cover that Jessica designed but I can't remember what was nice about it.

Verity ends up getting her poetry noticed through Instagram and then people actually start buying her book, and obviously it shoots up to #1 on the bestseller charts or something.

She meets this guy at the bookstore who goes by the nickname Sash because of course he does. Lang Leav's one and only way of adding character depth to the Love Interest seems to be by giving him a fun nickname. (At least Sash is more bearable than “Duck”). He's older and we're supposed to believe that they're instant soul mates and they love each other immediately. He's also pretentious and they bond over how they're the only people left who like classic literature and that hipster bookstore.

He has cool friends but most importantly this one bitchy hot girl who Verity is jealous of immediately because Sash and her have a long messy history of dating and hooking up. This girl is also pretentious, the most out of everyone in this book as this is her main character trait, and she likes to trash on every book ever written aside from a handful of classics or current unknowns. However she might be the only two dimensional character in this book as she's shown to be caring, generous and charitable in her personal life when she's not being an absolute snob in some indie café. Also she hates Verity because she's hung up on Sash even though he's clearly an idiot who thinks the love of his life is some wide-eyed nineteen year old that he just met.

After a couple dates they have a scene on a rooftop where they tell each other they're in love and she says “what is this?” and he says “I don't know, maybe ... the rest of our lives?” like honestly what kind of douchebag. And then they do it in his car but it's “romantic” and it's revealed that she's only ever done it with one other guy, also in a car.

Also Verity thinks her friends are better and more normal than Sash's friends but they're also crap. At one point the coffee shop that Jessica's boyfriend works at is closing or something and they're like “oh no! This is the ONLY good coffee shop around, where are we going to go now?” Like. Literally anywhere.