The Move

Normally, I would have stopped reading this book much earlier than I did but I'm trying nowadays to not immediately dnf a book because there's one aspect of it that irritates me. After this book I might have to return to my initial policy.

My first minor irritation was that the heroine, a 30 year old woman, was waiting for her crush to ask her out and was sending pheromones his way to push him in that direction. She was then hurt and surprised when it turned out he had had a girlfriend for one year who was now his fiancé. Well, no kidding, did you expect him to magically get a whiff of your pheromones and immediately understand that he HAD to ask you out? As opposed to oh I don't know, you asking him out yourself? What was it exactly that was stopping her from making the first move again? I honestly couldn't tell you. However, in an effort to be more tolerant I shelved that issue.

Then the heroine's mother's staunch feminism was treated as a punchline. And while there was no overt anti feminism (at least in the portion that I read), there seemed to be a slight suggestion in the tone of the writing, that feminism was an overreaction. I think it would have been one thing for the heroine to have more traditional views of marriage than her mother and want more traditional things without her mother's views being treated as faintly ridiculous.

Also before going to Missouri, her mother directly tells her to “watch out for racists”( I want to add that this neither read as sarcastic nor tongue in cheek). What? Who says that? As someone who left her predominantly black country at 17 to live in a predominantly white country, my mum certainly never told me to watch out for racists. And now I feel cheated. After reading that line it became increasingly clear to me that this book was not written by a person of color because it seemed like an outsider's approximation of the kind of conversations that people of color have with their parents before moving to places where there are fewer people who look like them. Or maybe all caricatured biracial NYU gender studies professors tell their daughters to “watch out for racists”. How would I know?

Despite all this, I still persevered.

Then finally our intrepid heroine gets to Missouri and meets the hero's mum, who immediately tells her to distract the hero from his girlfriend(who just had a miscarriage!) by showing some boob. And guess who just went along with this idea, to the point of shopping with the mum for a whole new sexy dress? You guessed it. Our heroine (I can't for the life of me remember her name). This. This was finally the point where I threw in the towel. I realized that I was firmly in crazy town and it was only going to get worse from here. So I finally did the responsible thing and dnfed the book. I mean this is probably my longest review and I barely got 40% into the book. I would probably have written a 300 page review if I had had to finish reading this novel.