i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's fii was actually scared to read this.
and i should've been. but for other reasons.
i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's first book, because while it didn't have much going on besides shock value and gore it at least did those two things in kind of an interesting way.
reading this was completely unpleasant from start to finish, and not because of the gross-out content. the writing is actively bad, full of clichés and adjectives, and somehow even though all of these stories (?) are very short, they drag on, not ending at the moment they'd be effective or shocking. characterizations are inconsistent, and in fact characters seem almost beside the point — none of these figures feel comprehensible, let alone human or real.
there's repetition here of whole details or lines of dialogue. favorite words are used to the in point of incomprehension — play a drinking game with covet, sense, decidedly, merely, perhaps with 911 on speed dial. this is teeming with repeated images (we get it, wounds have lips), adverbs, em dash breaks for more synonyms and more adverbs.
it's overwritten to the point that words have no meaning, which makes for a wildly frustrating read.
terrifying.
bottom line: i was anticipating this as a book that would make me truly scared, and i am: for the future of publishing.
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like tpretty great title if you ask me.
so at least i liked one thing.
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like the qr code. the fact that this book is full of them is the least of its worries.
among the biggest of my worries, you're surely wondering? thank you for asking. that's simple:
WHY DO MEN NEED TO WRITE SO MUCH ABOUT PENISES. i'm no prude but at a certain point spending this much time on phalluses takes up what we should've allotted to regularly scheduled programming, like character development, or themes. you know. the little things. (buh dum ch.)
in fact, an inexcusable section of page count is spent on shock value, masturbation, gross-out descriptions, pop-culture references, and brand names. what we're left with couldn't amount to much even in the best case scenario.
i enjoy an unlikable character more than a likable most of the time, because i am annoying and my brain is a cesspool, but i can't bear an unsympathetic one. we spend 300 pages in the mind of glue, and what is intended to be an exploration of the millennial experience left me unmoved and unrepresented. and in spite of the synopsis' claim that this book centers around hong kong's protests and "demise," that felt like an afterthought at best.
i liked the author's first book, but this reads a lot like the sophomore novel of someone whose debut was praised for its originality and literary quality when its most interesting portions were its observations of other art.
which is, you know. what happened.
bottom line: it's never a good sign when you're writing a rant on netgalley.com.
i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would ii'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.
this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.
more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.
beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?
add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.
there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.
there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.
in other words...a lot of unearned style here.
and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior.
not to mention that goofy ending.
anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.
it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.
this book is truly nothing more than its title: extremely simple, almost annoying and cloying writing about very preschool-level topics, like imaginarthis book is truly nothing more than its title: extremely simple, almost annoying and cloying writing about very preschool-level topics, like imaginary friends and hitting and stuffed animals.
i read this book because of its title, and its title is the explanation for everything i hated about it.
life is so cruel in its ironies.
bottom line: i can't believe i'm giving this one star, and i can't think of any reason to give it more than that....more
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book: wired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finreading incredibly long books: tired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book: wired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book without enjoying it for even a moment: whatever is better than wired
reading murakami is always a balancing act between how brilliant he is and how misogynistic he is, and let me tell you this one was pretty heavily leaning one way!
it is actually just arduous and difficult to read 1,318 pages of women being described by their breasts. i have a pretty high tolerance for sexism in media, perhaps to a worrying extent, but sexual assault, pedophilia, and harassment were at the core of this plot. it's a lot harder to ignore the very strange way murakami writes women when that's the case.
but even beyond that, reading from the perspective of a female character who cannot go a chapter without thinking about her boobs...it gets old! i don't know when murakami encountered a beautiful woman who apologized to the ugly older men she slept with for the size of her chest, but i'm praying for her healing.
bottom line: i'm going to keep reading murakami. i'm just going to delete this book from my brain....more
my only hope and desire for this book was that it scare me so much i would be rendered completely unable to sleep.
so imagine my devastation when it wamy only hope and desire for this book was that it scare me so much i would be rendered completely unable to sleep.
so imagine my devastation when it was not only not scary, but bad.
here are just a few of the myriad examples of its eternal capacity for disappointment:
1) this is so unbelievably british that i actually googled if the author is even from england. it's giving one direction fanfiction written by an american 15 year old with a polyvore account. i'm ready to throw my hair into a messy bun and gaze into harry styles' green orbs.
2) you cannot have this unbelievably intrusive, annoying person-narrator and also have the narrator be omnipotent. this is creative writing 101. you have to pick a lane. if i'm picking for you, i'd choose the option that isn't giving theater kid, but it's up to the author really.
3) okay, you chose theater kid. that's fine. except having a narrator who is a bad writer just means your book is going to be poorly written. and i guess that's fine too. but maybe consider the rest of us when deciding page count next time.
4) so many nouns used in back to back sentences. you know that thing? does that bother anyone else? catch me rephrasing in my own head instead of reading. just freelance, unpaid copyediting for nothing but a bad attitude and a love of the game.
5) for a book that uses the word island on every page it sure forgets where it is. calling an ambulance if you're in the middle of the sea isn’t going to help, bucko!
6) the plot has some serious holes in it, as in i don't believe that characters would do what they end up doing. in spite of spending a lot of time spent talking self-indulgently about the importance of motive, the book doesn't listen to its own advice.
7) it also can't decide whether it's about one truly evil person, or a group of bad people, or the inherent badness of everyone, and ends up somewhere unsatisfying between all of them — one person punished excessively, the others floating off to a life of joy after their sins and their pettiness to spend their days dancing and doing yoga like a yogurt commercial.
even though they, too, suck.
as does this book.
bottom line: the scariest part of this whole thing was that it somehow kept getting worse.
well, i accidentally read taylor swift fanfiction.
it did not go well.
this is partially due to the fact that i am no taylor swift fan. i know this is cwell, i accidentally read taylor swift fanfiction.
it did not go well.
this is partially due to the fact that i am no taylor swift fan. i know this is currently tantamount to committing domestic treason or to thumbs-downing videos of baby animals forming interspecies friendships, but i can explain. i'm not secretly a 29 year old man recording too-close tiktoks of himself ranting about how now he can't watch the big game on sundays without seeing her face. i have simply always been neutral, and now she is everywhere. that's fine.
it's also beside the point, because in spite of my fairly opinion-less take on her...even i think this book, which claims to be solidly pro on the topic, has a pretty unfair depiction of her whole deal.
it is very weird to profit off of the most famous person in the world in what you claim is a love letter to her by perpetuating the meanest stereotypes about her — that she profits off her breakups on purpose and wouldn't be famous without them.
i have a lot of criticisms, beginning with carbon emissions and ending with money chasing, but even i can't deny she's talented.
on top of that, this book is just bad. in some silly ways, such as: - the liberally inserted very bad song lyrics - the number of adjectives - the moment when taylor-by-another-name escapes a crowd of rabid fans by (check notes) walking down the street and putting sunglasses on - essentially-taylor insising wearing her full wedding dress onstage...every single show, because nothing says "ready to perform" like 20 pounds of tulle - taylor-insert making our male main character do a fashion show to determine his new rock star look, ultimately deciding on (again let me check my notes) a "rakish bow tie" and "glasses" like a "lounge pianist." she skated straight past rock star to theater kid - the idea that our love interest could just open his laptop and buy a ticket the day of the final show of a tour we've been repeatedly told is sold out - imagine playing piano and asking the musician how they want it to sound and they go "like sunrise after sleepless nights." i'm putting in 2 weeks notice
it's also bad in some not as silly ways. this couple had less than no chemistry, to the point that i assumed we were still early in the book until i was flabbergasted by a surprise kiss and looked to see we were at the halfway mark. the only thing more surprising was the sex scene.
this is a second chance romance, and it seems like all of their love story is predicated on the idea that one time they had chemistry and that they share musical talent. but neither of those are on page so i don't know what we're doing here.
not to mention the writing. if you're into emotions described like "I snuff the rogue indignation" or "She endeavors to smile" or "inquisitive disappointment," this is the book for you.
so much of this book is just STRANGE. our love interest's tragic backstory is that his family's retirement home is closing. our heroine is dragging around her newly divorced mom on a pop concert tour she doesn't seem interested in. why were these choices made??? we spend so much time on these bizarre plot points and it's like...why put them in at all???
and i just can't stress enough how if your retirement community is failing, i don't see how dating taylor swift for the publicity is the best way to handle that. last i heard geriatrics weren't her primary demo. it's one thing to sell jerseys to teenage girls, quite another to try to convince them to put their grandparents into a home in the rural south. and the book just ends without resolution on this so who knows!
riley (read: taylor) is one of the least likable protagonists i've read in memory: completely selfish, fame-obsessed, describes "what she does" as "reaching everyone with her music," listening constantly to her own songs, inviting her ex husband to events "for inspiration," and unable to understand why everyone doesn't immediately kowtow to her in a scenario where basically everyone already does. i don't really know how to describe how unrealistic and unfeeling and borderline sociopathic this character is, but it certainly isn't a flattering portrayal of taylor swift!
so if this book isn't for her fans, and it isn't for her non-fans...who is it for?
bottom line: this is a money grab with no plan to get the money.
sure, this book is pretty ridiculous, and all of its lines of dialogue feel like punch-ups on a netflix show written by millennials about gen z, and tsure, this book is pretty ridiculous, and all of its lines of dialogue feel like punch-ups on a netflix show written by millennials about gen z, and there's an unnecessary love triangle, and all of the characters are pure evil or worse, annoying, and it's inexplicably and clumsily written from the point of view of a teenage boy who is forced to learn a lesson about how Women Are People Too at the end à la an after-school special or a video you'd watch in health class...
"darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping"...me when i lie!
in some ways, i feel bad for this book, which has been totally mismarke"darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping"...me when i lie!
in some ways, i feel bad for this book, which has been totally mismarketed...but in more ways, i feel bad for me, because i had to pick this up and hate every second of it.
and also, i had to both discover a dream job (this is about a guy who works in hell trying to get people to sell their souls to the devil!) and have it stolen from me (this is very boring) in one fell swoop.
that is life-changing, tragic-past, mean-guy-in-romance-novel-revealing-his-backstory level trauma.
i thought i was getting a goofy book about hell, à la the good place or layoverland, and instead i got roughly 7 pages of that and then 900 chapters of teenage trauma and pedophilia, respectively.
two plotlines i thought would be be at least related, if not interesting, that managed to be neither.
bottom line: the real hell was the book we read along the way.
this book contains two affairs, an entire friend group swinging, multiple breakups, marriage-threatening behavior, blackmail, company-wide food poisonthis book contains two affairs, an entire friend group swinging, multiple breakups, marriage-threatening behavior, blackmail, company-wide food poisoning, secret exes, long-term deception, and, in the worst sin of all, one person having to cook dinner for everyone AND do the dishes.
and no one gets mad at each other even once.
WHERE is the DRAMA??!
perhaps this is because of our protagonist, O Perfect One.
O Perfect One catches her husband graphically cheating on her, WITH HER MENTEE, at their SHARED WORKPLACE, and she is never anything but nice to that girl. including in that exact moment.
she IMMEDIATELY and COMPLETELY forgives said husband, and so in spite of reconnecting with the Love Of Her Life approx 17 pages into the story, she doesn't even THINK about him until after he was already unfaithful and she STILL is tormented by guilt because of her perfect true-north moral compass.
and least relatable of all, she cooks everyone stir fry on the first night of vacation AND washes the dishes and wineglasses when they go to sleep with not even 1 bad thought.
this book is so f*cking boring.
everyone is okay with everything!
it's ostensibly about swinging and about affairs, but it's uncomplex, cartoonish, and ill-conceived, so we land squarely in snooze city.
bottom line: i honestly don't know how you make a book that sounds this interesting this moment-to-moment boring.
turns out a story going viral for being controversial and potentially plagiarized is maybe not the best sign of literary quality.
i wanted to read thisturns out a story going viral for being controversial and potentially plagiarized is maybe not the best sign of literary quality.
i wanted to read this purely out of my love of drama, and drama is what i got. in a way.
this was the literary equivalent of a 13 year old who shops at hot topic because it's the edgiest thing she can possibly imagine. every story tried to one up itself in gruesomeness and shock value, and instead revealed an unnuanced, stupid perspective on a world populated with evil, simple men and women who are twisted but whose personalities and flaws come solely from the wickedness of the patriarchy, not due to any complexity or individuality of their own.
i hated reading it!
bottom line: kristen roupenian has never written anything as strong, complicated, or unique as the essay by the woman whose life cat person stole from....more
I have a sort of whimsy to me, I never want to grow up, I am naturally suited to leading a ragtag group of I'm like the Peter Pan of being unpleasant.
I have a sort of whimsy to me, I never want to grow up, I am naturally suited to leading a ragtag group of people younger than me (I was a camp counselor for many years).
And also I am a huge hater.
In other words, I had to read this book for a workplace book club, and I hated it both because it's not good and because I abhor grown-up activities of any kind.
But I'll try to focus on the book. Seeing as this is a "review of it" and all.
This shindig involves some truly stunningly bad writing.
This book doesn't understand its own characters - some, if not most, of these actions have no explanation whatsoever. When the story ends and it's wrap up loose ends time, there is both a moment in which our narrator literally says the bad guy's actions are inexplicable, AND a moment when she destroys her own characterization.
In fact, the ending is so bad, so immoral, so unintentionally convincing of our main character's soullessness and her stupid boyfriend's, that it made me consider other more interesting plot points, like me killing all of them in the first cross-fiction murder spree in history.
The single most readable bit in the whole thing is when it accidentally implies a plot twist that would create a story line approximately 100,000 times more interesting than the one we actually have, and even though in any other context I would have thought it was lame I gasped with joy and gratitude.
But no. It was just misleading.
If only.
Bottom line: Everything is bad.
----------------- pre-review
reading this for my work book club. this is the most adult thing i have ever done
You may be saying, emma, that should not be surprising. It has a low average rating and just because you sawActually stunned by how much I hated this.
You may be saying, emma, that should not be surprising. It has a low average rating and just because you saw its pretty cover illuminated as if from heaven by the sunlight streaming in a newly discovered cute indie bookstore doesn't mean you were universally preordained to like it.
And to that hypothetical statement from a person I just made up, I say: 1) it should, and 2) I like lit fic with low averages all the time.
But in this case - possibly the first time I have allowed myself to break my only-buy-books-you-have-read-and-liked rule in several years, meaning I spent $28 to have this deeply unpleasant experience - that did not apply.
This was not for me, which is a nice way of saying I hated it and think it sucks.
But I'm not saying that, because I'm polite.
In this book, we follow a girl whose name I don't remember - Anna, oops - who wants to be an opera singer. She's in school for it, but she's Not Like Other Opera Students, because she is not rich. She lives with a perfect best friend, Laurie, she has overly strict and clingy parents who Just Don't Get It, and sometimes she has to work at a jazz club (also singing) in order to afford tuition and whatnot.
How she suffers.
She is also the worst.
(As someone who had to work through college, like a normal person, having a job within the field you're passionate about that you have to do, like, 2 nights a week sounds like a goddamn daydream.) (But whatever.)
Soon she meets a rich handsome older guy at said jazz situation, and, shock of shocks, begins a toxic and financially dependent relationship with him that will ultimately be her downfall.
Point for point, plot for plot, this is a worse, deluded version of Conversations with Friends that manages to miss the entire intention of Conversations with Friends.
I learned the "Not every book about a younger woman and an older, handsome, captivating man embarking on an all-encompassing and toxic romance that talks about what it is to be an adult, in a young woman's body, and mentally ill along the way can be Sally Rooney quality!" lesson all over again.
Let's get into the specifics: - This book has a terrible main character, which can be fine and even good for me. I love evil women. I'm the same girl who once sided with an ex's mean girl roommate solely because she was mean and a girl. But Anna is not really complicated, or nuanced - she is mostly just an annoying theater kid. And that is unforgivable.
- Worse, we can never escape Anna, because THIS BOOK IS IN THE FIRST PERSON. Usually when people make a comment in a review like "this is first person present and I hate first person present!!" I am impressed, because my brain rarely works in perspective like that. But now, I get it. Now I hate first person, and it's Anna's fault. I pray for the sweet mercy of distance provided by third.
- I couldn't get into the writing. I had my pen in hand, ready to underline some outstanding passage or poetic turn of phrase or relatable moment, and that pen went unused entirely. A cap-on situation from page one.
- So much hypocrisy! I think there's intended to be a bit of questioning here, as Anna judges other women (especially my sweet angel Laurie) for not being feminist enough, but she also points out that this random play she sees isn't, even as she remains the most anti-feminist character I have ever encountered. Thankfully this book is going to be largely unread, because if it was in the hands of the general public, it would single-handedly set back the rights of women by a half-century or so.
- At one point, we pause to indulge Anna on a whiny soliloquy - the likes of which, in point of fact, makes up roughly 90% of this book as we spend it all tortuously subjected to the contents of her head - on the state of opera. I don't want opera to be like this! she says. I don't want it all to be slutty women, hurt women, assaulted women, tragedies occurring to women. And then we continue on with the book, which is completely and entirely about the exact same goddamn thing. Anna's life imitating her art, I suppose.
- There is so much selfishness and entitlement in this book. If you cannot really sit down and suspend your disbelief and buy into the idea that the single worst thing going on in the world today is that opera is a bit elitist, you won't have a good time.
- What was the point of any of this? I can try to buy into the idea that any of these awful things were intentional, but if I do, they don't provide any clarity on what we're doing here. By the end, we remain immersed in a toxic wasteland of middling happiness and repeated mistakes, trapped in a watery and half-baked ideology that is neither how I see the world nor how I want to.
- The ending pissed me off. Bad. Permanently.
I think I'm done complaining, but in a much more real way I will be hating on this for the rest of my life.
Bottom line: Least enjoyable book I've read in recent memory! A fun superlative.
i love complaining. it's one of life's great and consistent joys. like perfectly toasted bagels, or screaming into the void.
what's annoying is that i'm complaining about the same thing every time.
BECAUSE EVERY ALI HAZELWOOD BOOK IS THE SAME.
two scientists, one huge, boring, grumpy, mean, uninteresting, i mean crime-against-humanity-level dry (except that crimes against humanity would be more fun to read about) love interest dude, one tiny, quirky, very small, not like other girls, silly, jennifer lawrence 2012 tumblr gal.
they have a huge size mismatch, the guy is in love for his entire adult life, the girl doesn't notice until the 75% mark, la di da.
SNOOZE!!!
i hate Big Man Tiny Woman (because i am tall but more importantly because i am an adult, and being a small child in a paternalistic romantic relationship has less than zero hypothetical value to me), and this novella responded to that with 49 mentions of this unholy He Big She Tiny trope.
at least this book does me the favor of being horrible in new and intriguing ways, in addition to ye olde standards.
like how the central miscommunication is that the love interest thinks he sexually assaulted our protagonist. lol. tres romantic. and how generally so much of this revolves around sex that seems nonconsensual.
and how at one point our main character has forgotten her bra at his apartment and her very charming and normal love interest (whose, uh, package is, i must tell you, so large that finding a means of navigating it near and around our teeny protagonist makes up the closest thing this book has to a plot) says she can't have it back because he's been jacking off into it.
while they weren't speaking because he thought he SA'd her.
IS THAT HOT???
at the very least it seems financially inadvisable. bras are expensive.
bottom line: unbelievably nightmarish. in so many ways.
---------------- currently-reading updates
reading a series out of order makes me feel roughly as daring and uncomfortable as i imagine skydiving would. or skipping dessert
---------------- tbr review
injustice is: the fact that i have 4 ali hazelwood books on my tbr and none of them are out yet...more
There are a couple of reasons to ask yourself why a book exists.
One is if it is simply purposeless. For example, if it's a previously unannounced surpThere are a couple of reasons to ask yourself why a book exists.
One is if it is simply purposeless. For example, if it's a previously unannounced surprise sequel to a book that appears to be conceived solely to avoid the backlash of accidentally calling a book without a happily ever after a "romance," flying in the face of the singular requirement for a book to be called that.
I just said book so many times.
Another is if it is simply terrible, bad on every level, with characters who are unbearable to read about and a total lack of plot and a writing style that is grating, so that every moment, every page, every paragraph is a burden and a punishment.
This book, you may have guessed, is impressive because I am asking why it exists for both reasons.
It has been a long time since I read something I actively hated this much!
And there are a lot of reasons for that!
For example: this book was clearly published because at the end of the first book, the couple was not together, and the lack of HEA meant it couldn't be a romance. You can see a bunch of negative reviews of it if you don't believe me.
But when this book starts......they are together???? So I don't understand what we're doing here??
There is a breakup scene at the end of the last book, I promise. I was not hallucinating. It was too vividly bad for me to forget, and believe me, I've been trying.
But here we are. As if nothing ever happened. It feels like the first book happened, then a second book's worth of events happened, but that happened in a three-month window that we skipped entirely and find ourselves here, in nonsense land of no story or events.
In other words, this is basically if you read a romance between, like, a prince and a commoner and the end of the first book they get married, and then the second book is just her like :( and his family like :(
So all the boring stuff. And also you don't get to see the happily ever after part. So even more boring stuff instead of good stuff.
As if that weren't enough to qualify this as the silliest and most frustrating read of all time, THERE'S MORE. It's all goofy and deus ex machina-y: Three characters previously established to be straight are suddenly gay, explanation-less-ly, so they can all date each other.
I don't know why that feels like an insurmountable problem, for even one background character to be single when this miserable duology slogs to its end, but here we are.
AND! In case you were tempted to be rooting for these wayward stepsiblings (although I don't know why you would be - they are annoying apart but even worse together), they f*ck at work! Where their mom (lol) gave them jobs! And are recorded! On security cameras!
And we are expected to sympathize!
With the two most unsympathize-able characters of all time!
I need to lie down.
Bottom line: I would get a lobotomy if it would help me forget this book.
---------------- pre-review
this manages to have no plot and still be filled with drama, toxicity, and unpleasantness at every second.
it's kinda impressive, in that way.
review to come / 1.5 stars
---------------- tbr review
a pun and a pretty cover. what more can a book have
First: I used to give one star ratings all of the time. I would read books exclusively Life, probably, is about growth.
I have three relevant examples.
First: I used to give one star ratings all of the time. I would read books exclusively because they were popular, I would hate them, I would write a rant review, repeat.
And while you may be tempted to say, "emma, you still do that," and while in many ways you would be correct, I have this piece of evidence for you: I only gave five one stars in all of last year.
Which makes it extra impressive that just six days into 2022, I'd already given this one.
But onto the second example.
Which is: this is Katrina Leno's first book, and it is by a country mile her worst one. That expresses progress, if anything.
And finally: None of us have to read books like this anymore!!!!
In the early to mid 2010s, mental illness was consistently treated like a plot twist, a thriller trope, and, like, a death sentence. Young adult contemporaries had sad mentally ill teens moping around and being unlovable. Young adult mysteries had mental illness as crime motives. Young adult fantasies had mentally ill villains / mentally ill deus ex machina / mentally ill teens moping around being unlovable, too.
This book characterizes that period.
Now, you can pick up any YA contemporary and pretty much guarantee that 1-3 characters are depressed and anxious and zero of them are going to become anthropomorphic garbage cans because of it. No one in their Oscar the Grouch era, if you will.
When you pick up this book...no such guarantees.
The mental illness portrayal is the worst part of this book, but it is by no means the only complaint I have.
The second worst part is the romance. This is, like the mental illness rep, what I like to mentally refer to as "Mara Dyer-esque," meaning it's insta-love-y and features a lot of mentions of oddball combinations like black hair and green eyes or a British accent smack dab in the middle of Florida.
The romance is particularly bad because it is treated as our "escape" or "relief." It is the supposedly nice break we get from the main plot (which, since I didn't mention it, is our protagonist slowly realizing she can't remember huge parts of her life, and the reveal is (view spoiler)[she has dissociative identity disorder, which, as we all know, is handled perfectly by pop culture every time (hide spoiler)]).
The third worst (and still, for those following along, very bad) part is the characters. I hate them very much.
We have the titular Molly, who manages to be either the rough equivalent of a rag doll in her ability to act and decide things or inexplicably belligerent to those around her.
We have a guy whose name I don't remember, but it's definitely like Jack or Ryder or something, who dies at the very beginning but still manages to befit his forgotten name (misogyny, egocentrism, being annoying) via flashbacks.
We have another guy whose name I don't remember, who is the brother of the first guy whose name I don't remember, and is called something like Miles or maybe also Ryder. He is very boring, and additionally commits one of my personal least favorite social transgressions: being someone who is too old to be in high school but wants to date a high schooler, for some reason.
We have two friends of Molly's who really only appear to remind Molly that she is not being a good friend to them, so that is as fun as it sounds. We have a brother of Molly's who appears occasionally to call her, like, a selfish b*tch, which seems a bit harsh even if I agree. We have a little sister of Molly's who is I think not yet or barely a teenager but is characterized like a soccer mom behind the wheel of a Honda Odyssey.
And that's our world.
The fourth worst part is the plot and structure. We begin with a character dying, who our protagonist doesn't know, but he knows our protagonist. Then the brother of this character shows up, and it seems like he knows her, too. Then she starts realizing that she doesn't remember stuff. Then flashbacks begin.
This book is very corny and flat, and (view spoiler)[the Sybil reference and the deus ex machina cure of DID (hide spoiler)] at the stupid big reveal is the corniest, dumbest, worst bit of all.
Everything is relatedly very out of order, down to like. Paragraphs. It does not seem like a deliberate choice, and if it is, what global-scale geopolitical crime did 12 to 16 year olds commit in the 2010s to warrant this book being their punishment.
Basically how I feel is that if a book is confusing and I also hate the characters, I'm not invested, I'm just annoyed, and I'm going to throw a tantrum and write 2,000 words while doing so.
The fifth worst part, and the one that made me the saddest, is that this is unrecognizable to me as Katrina Leno. I haven't loved all of her books, but all of them have at least had the following things: - writing that can easily transition between lovely and funny - great friendships (and sometimes romances) with great banter - some nice feminism
This had none.
It replaced it all simply with suffering.
Bottom line: It has been so long since I wrote a rant review. I think the anger and the throwback have reverted me to 19 years old again.
Add it to the list of this book's cruelties.
----------------------- pre-review
it's a beautiful thing, liking an author enough to read books that sound completely uninteresting
update: it is not a beautiful thing. don't listen to me ever.
I know they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
But I've been doing this review-every-book-I-read thing for too longI know they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
But I've been doing this review-every-book-I-read thing for too long to give up now, so...
This book has tacos in it. Tacos are good. Yum.
This concludes the nice section of this review.
I have said this before (but then, I have said most things before. It feels like I have lived a hundred lifetimes on this website), but the thing about straight romance is that it depends entirely on the author's ability to get us all to suspend our disbelief and buy into the concept of a Perfect Man.
Or even a worthwhile one.
Tough stuff, no? I've never experienced one in real life. They're like unicorns, or a full and natural understanding of physics - at this point I have to assume they're made up, unfortunately. Nice as they sound.
That only gets truer in an enemies to lovers scenario. I love enemies to lovers, and, as always, when I say I love something that means I love the idea of it, read every example of it I can find, and enjoy approx 10% of it.
Say it with me: enemies to lovers does not mean assholes to lovers!
Take the love interest in this book, for example: A multimillionaire who has, by his own admission, sold out his own culture and community. He owns multiple $100,000 cars, he buys buildings for cheap to sell them for more and gentrify neighborhoods.
None of that works for me.
But emma, you may be saying. Ever heard of a little thing called character development?
To that I say: currently my memories of well-done character development feel like the memories of the dad character in A Little Princess (film adaptation, sorry bookworms) (insert PAPA, PAPA! here). In other words, they are foggy, distant, all but gone - baby, that is the kind of reading year I am having thus far.
But even when I dust off the definition via good ol' Googling, it appears that the characters are supposed to become more tolerable, even BETTER as the book goes on.
That doesn't happen here.
Ramón and Julieta is a Romeo and Juliet retelling in which Julieta is a hot chef with an indie taco shop and Ramón is a property developer / venture capitalist / owner of a Taco Bell-esque franchise that was founded upon the stolen recipe of Julieta's mother.
Cool guy, no?
It gets better. The way that Ramón undertakes his quest to become a person I, personally, can stand reading about (otherwise known as his character arc) is by hiring Julieta to be the chef of the restaurant he's opening.
Which is - get this - taking the place of a half-dozen working and lower middle class businesses in the historically Mexican neighborhood Julieta lives in.
But it gets EVEN BETTER THAN THAT. Not only does Ramón destroy Julieta's sense of community by making her the enemy of all of them, he appears to have hired her to be (checks notes) the victim of sexual harassment.
Check out this passage, which is supposed to be the kind of steamy swoony content that gets us shipping these two from now until we have mercifully forgotten this read.
"'Would you like to discuss my ideas for the menu?' 'Not exactly.' Ramón's eyes raked over her, dropping to her breasts. He gave her a mischievous smile. Julieta's nerves tingled. But she hated her body for betraying the way she felt toward him. After he finally looked away, he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a leather folder. He then took out a super expensive-looking pen and began to write notes. 'Then what?' Ramón finally focused his attention back on Julieta. 'Well, first, I'm going to watch you.' Julieta instinctively clasped her hand to her chest. Ramón made those words seem dirty."
I read an e-ARC and quotes are subject to change, so I will just say I am far closer to calling in an anonymous complaint on a fictional character than I am to rooting for these two.
Skin crawling.
Another quote (subject to change) to file under Ramón Finding New And Creative Ways To Get Worse: this interaction with the woman who brought him into this world.
"His mom huffed. 'You aren't still serious about that chef, are you? I looked her up. She has tattoos, Ramón. All over her arms. She's trash.' "Rage boiled through Ramón. 'No, Mom. She's not trash. You are.'"
This boy called his own mommy trash!
I don't care how much my mom talks sh*t about tattoos, I am never looking her in the eyes - IN PUBLIC IN FRONT OF HER FRIENDS - and calling that woman garbage.
I'm supposed to want happiness for this bozo!? I want to enroll him in court-mandated therapy!
On top of all this, here are a few pesky loose end complaints: - I tried to get into this so many times and I just couldn't. I just had to force myself through, like I was doing math homework, or eating vegetables - Every thought these two have about each other is sexual. I've complained before about romance novels in which the love story is only conducted through smut, but this is...wow, yes, the results are in: EVEN WORSE! - Ramón's dad and Julieta's mom also had a bunch of sex in the past, and there is something about that that is just simply puke emoji to me. - Finally, this did the really hilarious retelling thing in which the characters are constantly referencing the original? It is so funny to me to imagine these two, who are quoting R&J to each other constantly, failing to be like "Hey wait a second...our families hate each other...we're star crossed...wait, our names are their names? Just what is going on here..."
Well, the main difference is no one dies in this one.
Except my hopes and dreams.
Bottom line: I wish I never read this book? And also that I had a taco.
--------------- currently-reading updates
"When fate and tacos bring Ramón and Julieta together..."
once upon a time, i read this book, and despite the fact that i have a heart of darkness (sorry joseph conrad) and am full of hate and vitriol (makes once upon a time, i read this book, and despite the fact that i have a heart of darkness (sorry joseph conrad) and am full of hate and vitriol (makes me a fun gossip though) and eat romance novels for breakfast (as in am very picky about them - i'm actually not a big breakfast eater)...
i enjoyed it.
and then i read everything else that this author has ever written, and i hated all of it.
and when to came time to revisit...
well, welcome to judgment day.
i hated this too.
maybe most of all.
(well, almost most of all. a love interest putting our protagonist's entire boob in his mouth is still not quite as terrifying and unsexy and jail-worthy as j*cking *ff into the discarded bra of the girl you s*xually *ssaulted, a real thing that happens multiple times in an actual ali hazelwood novella.)
i am an adult woman. i am tall. my hair is a normal, non-neon or -pastel color. i own zero pairs of knee-high socks with lisa frank prints on them, i am capable of feeding myself, and i do not live my life between instances of awe-inspiring misogyny from men that only other men can rescue me from.
this is a relatively typical list of traits, i think, and yet these details completely prevent me from enjoying even a moment of any given ali hazelwood I-Big-You-Small-Let's-Spend-40-Pages-Talking-About-How-I-Can't-Fit-Inside-You "romance."
c'est la vie.
bottom line: i officially give up on sunshine, rainbows, love, and happiness. and also this author.
--------------------- original review
(view spoiler)[Excuse me a moment. I just have to give myself a little pep talk. Won't take more than a paragraph or two.
Okay, Emma. I know you - gag - felt...feelings during this book. I know you were invested in the romance in a way that you have rarely been invested in anything that can remotely be construed as warm and cozy and positive. Your most-watched movie is Spotlight and when you were at home alone for a week you spent it rewatching Mindhunter and You. Your heart is typically shale-esque, in hardness and brittleness and darkness.
So I know that you're tempted to give five stars for the fact that it cracked your Grinchy shell and made your heart grow three sizes or whatever, but no.
This is not a perfect book even though reading it was, like, a near-perfect experience.
Even I, who thinks the miscommunication part of any romance is the best part due to the fact that is the most angsty and suffering-based, thought there were about 7 miscommunications too many here.
And I could have used a bit more personality from our love interest. Maybe, I don't know, actually I take that back because men should leave being fun and characterized to women, who do it better.
Okay. End pep talk because it isn't working. This is an insanely cute and skipped-heartbeat-inducing book and I want to give it five stars for that alone.
Maybe I'll come back to it.
Bottom line: Yippee! There's nothing more fun than enjoying a romcom!
--------------- pre-review
this is an extremely cute book that simultaneously rivals normal people in anxiety-inducing miscommunication.
after i'd already picked this up and read most of it, i learned through good samaritans in my comments that this was to some degree inspired by the Siafter i'd already picked this up and read most of it, i learned through good samaritans in my comments that this was to some degree inspired by the Sixties Scoop.
i won't tell you how you should feel about this, but i think that taking the unbearable trauma (a trauma that included not just the murder of a culture but also murder in a quite literal sense) of real-world Native children and turning that into a happy-go-lucky tale of how Hate Is Bad but the fantastical equivalent of those disgusting and reprehensible nonfiction orphanages is good...
well. i think that's f*cking gross. (and i have read from indigenous voices on both the Pro side and the Con side of this story. i have seen significantly more Con.)
here are some better reviews you can read about this: Kas's Sofia's
more of a review of my own to come.
okay, update - to give a bit more of a traditional review:
even had i not been informed of the at-least-partial inspiration behind this, there's no way this would have been higher than a 3 star read to me.
i don't like the saccharine or the sickly sweet. i don't like having to read about an unprecedentedly lonely man with a sh*tty life in a toxic workplace whose own cat, boss, coworkers, neighbors, and goddamn bus driver don't like him, in a city where it rains every day and he NEVER REMEMBERS HIS UMBRELLA.
i don’t like reading weirdly stilted dialogue, where the same sentences (“Quite.” “You dear man.” EVERY OTHER F*CKING SENTENCE SOME VARIATION “Oh you do, do you?” “Oh I did, didn’t I?” “Oh you have, have you?” “How I cherish/adore/simp for you.” Okay the last one I made up for a moment’s levity.)
i feel like this book could have been a hundred pages shorter and had the exact same impact on me. except it would be a touch and a tad more merciful, due to being shorter. this, to me, felt emotionally cheap and profoundly repetitive, as if enacting the same set of scenes where the characters show the same set of traits over and over would hypnotize me into falling in love with them.
this book is touted as feel-good kryptonite, but it didn’t make me feel good. it made me feel bad. maybe the rest of you are being deeply secretive about some magical island with cody ko-style blue ass water and a ragtag group of children sitting and waiting to give you unconditional love and a purpose in life, and also your soulmate and new best friend are there and baking pies, but…
many people are unhappy. many people are lonely. and as far as i can tell in the 23 years i’ve lived in this yucky world, there is no business trip that will deus ex machina your sorry ass into your place and your purpose and your people.
and i’ve never seen a wyvern either.
-------------- tbr review
i heard reading this is like a pure happiness injection, so here i am immediately
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