Passion or Pancakes

by Nathan Baylet

Spin the clock back to 2013 and enjoy a party-licious San Francisco Saturday night in the sparkly Marina! Kris and Bren meet up with friends, yearning for passion or pancakes. Mark and Chet also barhop, yearning for fun too. Anything can happen dancing, flirting, drunken tug-of-wars over the karaoke mic, and maybe even romance? Have the most fun ever from a rom-com novel with the first book in this hilarious and heartfelt Marina series. If you love Gilmore Girls banter and Sex and the City friendships you will be over the moon for this rom-com novel.

Genres: Romance, Humor, Fiction

306 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 10, 2023

About the author

Nathan Baylet is an American author and vlogger.

Reviews

[addie˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m guessing everyone is coming from drew’s video

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story was a compelling night out for this found family. The only reason for its low ratings was the difficult world building. However, I still fell in love with all 97 characters in the main cast. Thank you to my friend drew for this heartwarming recommendation.

[Alix D.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Def not here from some twinks youtube video

[Thunderbirdz0 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Free Drew

[Corey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like many other reviewers, I came here from the Drew Gooden video. Unlike many other reviewers, I actually read the book.

This book isn't particularly good, but I don't think it's meant to be good. It's a fun enough read but it's also insane. There are way too many characters. Drew's review is honestly spot on.

[Emma Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boyfriend bought this book for me after watching Drew’s video and, my god, I can’t believe this was published. I can’t even believe there’s a proofreader and an editor. It’s almost as if they read through this book and thought, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if we didn’t change anything and had it published as is.”

It was fun to read a lot of this book out loud to friends, so that was something to look forward to. I can’t believe I read this.

[Behi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess having Drew Gooden explain the whole plot, if you can even call it a plot and introduce the 97 Characters means i've read it.
3 Stars only for Drew's narrative

[Ryan Laughton-Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is the single best book ever

whos drew gooden?

[Z Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was, the longest sentence I have ever read

[Sherij · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why does Drew hate us all.so much?

[Erin Gunther · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully bad book. I cannot stress enough that this was a bad book. But that does not mean that it was not thoroughly enjoyable. I listened to the audiobook and the quality was not great but the way that the reader said many of the onomatopoeias made me giggle. I giggled a lot while reading this book. The only part that I could not stand was when they were going to go to Roger's friend's party and they all kept coming out of the karaoke bar and saying the exact same things over and over and over again. Also as I mentioned while I was reading, it is not very often that someone's stomach (named Sally) and someone else's freshly shaven balls are major plot points in a book, but here we are.

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was this a good book? No.
Was this a bad book? Mmm. Who’s to say?

It was horribly written and edited, had a bazillion confusing characters, made very little sense, and went HEAVY on the sitcom-esque jokes. But it was also endearing, hard to put down, and had me gut laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Also Nathan Baylet wrote it and I’m his biggest fan. So 5 stars!!!

[Quintin Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really bad book. Only read it due to Drew Gooden’s youtube video on and yeah its as bad as he said it was

Always why did there need to be this many characters and pop culture refeences?

[Lillian Morasch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen, it's not a good book, but I'm trying to offset all the people who didn't actually read the book, bringing hate here from Drew's video. Just like every commentary YouTuber says, don't bring hate to a creator just because you see a video poking fun. Nathan wrote a book, and that's no small feat! I'd give it maybe 2 stars for real, but it's not fair to rate a book you haven't read.

[Phoenix Kaufman · Rating 2 out of 5]

A friend of mine paid me to read this and tell her about it because she thought it would be funny. It is the worst writing I have ever read and, quite frankly, I’m not sure why or how it even exists. That said, I’ll refrain from giving it one star because, at the very least, it was not boring.

[Kushagra Srivastava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long live Drew Gooden and Nathan Baylet my beloved <3

[Mikayla]

Considering Drew explained the whole “plot” of this book and the connections to too many characters to count I feel as tho I have the right to say I have read this book

[Daisy Duitsman · Rating 5 out of 5]

iconic

[Kathy Wallen · Rating 1 out of 5]

January 8, 2025



If I were to pick one quote from this book to describe its entirety, it would be this one:

Roger was clearly intimidated by Mark's muscled super-size and totally thinking twice about fighting Bigfoot.

Yes. This novel was written, reviewed, printed, and published with that sentence still unironically standing on page 331. Just... *sigh*


The writing

When I wrote my Lord of the Flies review, I said that that was the worst writing in a published novel that I had ever seen. Well, then I read this book. You've already seen a hint of this book's writing, but I'm going to elaborate on it more here. The writing can best be described as "a horny teenager smoked some pot and decided to write a novel in one sitting," and this is the finished product.

The author's note states that "the first draft of this novel was shorter [and] 99% dialogue." This book is 355 pages (silly me thought that it was 366, but no) and probably is 65% dialogue, if I had to guess. I get that this book takes place over the course of one night, so you probably have to have a lot of dialogue and random conversation so that your novel isn't fifty pages long. But that doesn't excuse fact that about half of the conversations go something like this:

"Oh," Chet said. "Well, I have to enjoy your constant video-gaming and your bamboo shampoo."

"Bamboo shampoo?"

"Bamboo shampoo."

"Oh, bamboo shampoo."

"The bamboo shampoo in your shower."

"You don't like bamboo shampoo?"

"The bottle's HUGE!"

"It's bulk."

"It takes up half the shower."

"Not half."

"It's like showering with a fire hydrant."

"That would be an odd place for one."

"You gotta move your bamboo shampoo."

"I'm not moving my bamboo shampoo."

"Why won't you move your bamboo shampoo?"

"I like it."

"Well, I like my bikini mags."

"Clearly."

"And I like my yoga."

"Great."

This is dialogue that I would have written when I was twelve years old, thinking that I was clever and funny for saying "bamboo shampoo" eight times in one conversation on ONE page. This is quite literally nothing but filler to pad out the page count. Having a character say something and having the other character repeat what the first character JUST said is not only extremely lazy, but extremely annoying. What makes it worse is that our other set of characters whom we're following, Kris and Bren, also do the same thing where they just yap back and forth to each other for absolutely no reason other than to put words on the page.

Then there are twelve straight pages of this later in the novel:

Skip = "Do girls ever say, 'That's what I said to your dad'?"

Bren = "It doesn't really work that way."

Kris = "That's what I said to your dad."

Bren = "Hmm, it does work."

Chet = "That's what I said to your mom."

Bren = "You're such a perv."

Chet = "That's what I said to your housekeeper."

Bren = "You said that to my Roomba?"

Okay, I get it. Ten-or-so characters are stuck in an elevator, and now they're chatting. I can understand why you wouldn't want to use dialogue tags in a situation like this, where it would be "Bren said," "Holly said," "Roger said," "Kris said" for twelve pages straight. But you don't use freaking EQUAL SIGNS IN YOUR WRITING. There's these magical buttons on your keyboard called the shift and the semicolon and it gives you this punctuation mark called the "colon." This is when you use a colon. Not an EQUAL SIGN.

Speaking of signs that should never be used in a novel, I spotted at least two uses of the ampersand (&). I've personally never used the ampersand in my life because I can never get it to look right and it's just easier to write out the three-letter word, but even I know that you don't use an ampersand in basic writing, as such:

Bren & Roger talked books again

It literally takes more effort to type out the ampersand because you have to press the shift and then remember what key it's on when all that you had to do was type a, n, and d in succession to form the word that means the exact same thing.

Throughout the book, the female main character, Kris, sometimes counts down from ten to calm herself down. Generally, when you're writing and you need to mention a number that's smaller than three digits (or something like that), you write out the whole word: "Ten, nine, eight..."

Suddenly, Kris witnessed a miracle as peacekeeper Holly thrust herself forward, grabbed the mic out of Kris's hands, breaking up the fight and taking over the song! As if she was showing them how they should properly act in front of a crowd and how to put on a good show! Smiling big! Singing loud! Stomping feet! Swinging hair! Hand in the air! Belting to the back wall! And she looked like she was finally having fun as she let LOOSE!

AND HOLLY SANG!

AND HOLLY SANG!

AND HOLLY SANG!

And the song ended.

And Holly kept SINGING!

And SINGING!

And SIIIIIIIINGINGGGGGGGG!!!!

NO!

NO!

NO!

NO!

THIS IS NOT HOW YOU WRITE NOVELS!!!

I could also point out a couple of spelling errors, such as "charcters" and a few others whose whereabouts I forgot. Apparently there is an editor for this book, a "super-wise Erin Brown" as described by the author. Erin Brown, for the sake of potential future novels out there, please never go anywhere near a book with a red pen again.


The characters

Good grief, the characters. My friend who gave me this book said that there were a lot of characters, and then I looked on Goodreads and saw other reviewers saying that there are ninety-seven characters in this book. That seems a little high to me, but I didn't keep count of the characters, so I'll go with that number.

Our first main character is Kris, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who works as a personal trainer. She lives with thirty-something-I-can't-remember Bren, who does management stuff, I guess. In the first chapter of the book, Bren is trying to get Kris out the door on their seventh anniversary of being roommates, while Kris is just dancing around the room to various songs. (Another writing error: Just because you set your story in the real world doesn't mean that you need to reference real-world people and songs on every page. It dates your novel and will become obsolete in a hundred years. And it's just annoying and unnecessary.)

I found Bren to be a bit more likable than Kris, but that's not saying much, considering that Kris is probably one of the worst main characters about whom I have ever had the misfortune of reading. She's rather clingy, extremely self-centered, remarkably immature, and astonishingly self-righteous. When Bren and Kris find a random drunk girl named Calli lying on the sidewalk, Calli tells them her story: she was just dumped by her boyfriend, Huck, after coming here to San Francisco from Ohio, and now she has no place to live. Bren offers to take in Calli for the night and to let her stay at their apartment. Kris is opposed to this because she doesn't think that Calli should have everything handed to her on a silver platter, you see:

"My parents were super strict," Kris said. "And the day that I graduated high school, I snuck out a window, pawned their rare spoon collection for cash, and jumped on a train to as far as I could go, and I ended up in San Francisco. Finally free. And broke as f—. I flirted with dudes so that I could stay at their places, but they'd always dump me for a girl who had money for their drug habits, and I ended up crying on a sidewalk in torn sneakers too. But a nice woman, Hazel, saw me and invited me to be in her house, along with a bunch of other girls new to the city. I lived with Hazel and seven misfit roommates in this kinda crappy house in San Francisco where we had to wash dishes in the bathtub. It was like a new family, a sane family, and figured out how to, like, you know, live normal. I worked crap jobs, and dated some non-addict guys, and then somehow talked my way into a job as a nanny for rich f—ers. I earned enough cash to share an apartment with a nurse on Union Street with Zelda, and she helped me get into nursing school, but I got kicked out. And then my roommate Zelda moved to New York and Bren moved in, and Bren suggested that I go to physical trainer school. I did! Now I have awesome friends, a great apartment, a family of patio plants, I do a weekly exercise vlog, and I make bank as a physical trainer for even richer f—ers. I went from nothing to everything, 'cause of a kind stranger and relentlessness!" Kris threw her fist to the sky like a champion!

I CRINGED reading this. Kris acts like she's so good and all that because she "came from nothing" and had to work her way up. Hello, you didn't come from nothing? You could have made a plan first before you ran to what is probably one of the more expensive and unsafe cities in the United States, like saving some money, figuring out what you want your career to be, etc. But it isn't just this that bugs me. It's that none of this aligns with what else I've seen of Kris's character. Kris named her stomach Stacy and talks to "Stacy" when her stomach growls. She named a bunch of plants on her patio. She screams, "I'm changing the subject!" IN PUBLIC (!) whenever someone changes the subject in a conversation. She takes a million years to get out the door because she is too busy dancing to lousy pop music; she wants to put a disco ball in the bathroom and a seat belt on the toilet; she screeches, "Are you f—ing engaged?" at her ex-boyfriend when she sees him with another girl in public; she throws a fit and cries and screams at Bren when Bren announces that she might be moving to LA. KRIS IS NOTHING BUT IMMATURE, YET HAS THE AUDACITY TO ACT LIKE SHE'S BETTER THAN CALLI BECAUSE SHE HAD TO FACE AND OVERCOME THE CONSEQUENCES OF HER POOR AND IMPULSIVE CHOICES. GIVE ME A FUDGING BREAK.

With that out of my system... Mark, the male main character, was okay. He seemed to be one of the most normal of the group, wanting marriage and a family. Chet, Mark's new roommate and wingman, was fine, I guess, but him constantly talking about/making references to sex was grating. Skip, Chet's impromptu wingman, had an extremely stupid name but I guess was fine. Calli was annoying. Holly was a sweetheart. Vanessa should go die. Sara and Jane were sweet. Collin should go die as well. Maybe he should have gotten with Vanessa instead of Skip. I forgot the rest of the characters' names because there's ninety-fudging-seven of them.


The plot

This book DRAGGEDDDDD. It literally takes place over the course of ONE night, so the plot moves extreeeeeeeeemely slowly so that you, the reader, know EXACTLY what every character is doing and saying at every moment. It's super unnecessary. I don't need to know that Kris and Bren are talking about butter as they walk down the sidewalk. I don't need to know that Chet and Mark are talking about bamboo shampoo as they walk down the sidewalk. I don't need to know what every character is saying when twelve or so of them are trapped in an elevator.

The basic plot is that Kris and Bren are going out on the town to celebrate their seventh anniversary of living together. Chet wants to go out and get a girl for the night and convinces Mark, his new roommate, to turn off his video game and be his wingman for the night. The two pairs go to various bars and have boring conversations and do literally nothing until they meet halfway through the book. Kris and Mark hit off well, while their friends with them swap partners around throughout the night. They decide to go to a party in Bren's new guy friend's friend's apartment, where the elevator scene and a bunch of other irrelevant and boring stuff happens until the police show up and everyone leaves. They meet up at the pancake house and have pancakes, and now Chet and Holly are together and Bren dumped the other guy that she was with because he actually had a girlfriend. Skip is with Vanessa and everything's just great. That's literally all that happens in a 355-page novel. The author took what was probably a 100-page story and streeeetched it into 355 pages of fluff and filler and nonsense dialogue just to have more pages. I hate to break it to you, but more pages doesn't mean that your book is better. Just ask The Book Thief!

It's eleven o'clock and I have to get up at six tomorrow morning to go to school, so I'm ending my review here. This is definitely one of the worst books that I have ever read. The first 70% made no sense at all and I was still confused when the novel ended.

[Tiff · Rating 5 out of 5]

XDDDD So silly and funny I love it

[aksh · Rating 5 out of 5]

me and my friend took turns reading this out loud so thanks drew i want to die (of embarrassment) now

[Andy Paulsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely more passion than pancakes.

Nathan Baylet is a pen name for the Author, Drew Gooden. I'm not sure why he wanted to hide his identity, but I respect his choice.

Drew's debut novel is equal parts pent-up sexual frustration and Molly. No amount of Adderall can help you follow the plot or remember all the characters.

I love this book for the same reason I hate Sharknado: I think bad media is only fun when it's not intentionally bad. There is a sincerity to Drew's ineptitude. He is the Ed Wood of our generation. This book is the Troll 2 of the 2020s. It is a boon to the world that this book exists, and I can't wait for Drew's sequel: Whoopee or Waffles.

[Agarr]

En realidad no me lo he leído, me he visto el resumen de Drew en su video y me he meao, así que lo cuento igual

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is it good? No. Do I kinda fuck with it as an absurdist piece of literature? Hell yeah for some reason