Someone tell me to learn how to be okay with DNFing books.
My inability to do so is bringing only suffering to myself, and also to people everywhere, because when I force myself to finish a book I didn’t like you all have to deal with the repercussions (i.e., me grumping around on Goodreads complaining in 1,000 words about why a book was so grump-inducing).
Every single character in this book is a butt.
Normally I like to flatter myself that I have a “way with words,” meaning I write at a level just above that of a fifth grader, but to be honest I lack the energy or motivation to find a better way to describe the characters in this. They don’t deserve it. They are immature and they’re the worst and a fitting punishment is that I will refer to them exclusively as insults from the mind of your average ten-year-old.
Our main character, Evie, is a buttface. She is in her 384738297th year of a job where she is harassed, manipulated, overworked, and disrespected. She is a bad friend, a total doormat, and a straight-up fool. She has no ambitions or cunning and she f*cks everyone in her life over but somehow manages to STILL not stand up for herself.
Previous to this reading experience I was unaware that it was possible to be horrible to everyone around you and still not stand up for anything you believe in, but I have been enlightened.
Evie’s job throughout this book is to help Ezra, a famous screenwriter, write a rom-com script by enlisting herself in a series of meet-cutes.
For some reason, she takes it upon herself to present these to him in the form of...scenes. Pre-formatted, already edited, well-written scenes. Ready to be copy and pasted into a screenplay.
If you see where this is going, take my advice: Do not make my mistakes. Do not convince yourself that there’s no way that something so blatantly obvious and dumb could be the actual plot.
Because, for context, everything that Evie doesn’t realize throughout this whole thing is made abundantly clear to the reader.
But anyway, back to Ezra.
Ezra is a butthole who is obviously a butthole from the start. Sometimes Evie has these inexplicable scenes where she’ll make heart eyes at him because he’s hot, but they never make sense and they come from nowhere and the author doesn’t try all that hard to make us buy into them.
But really the butthole thing is all I have to say about Ezra.
Evie’s boss, Monty, who is the one (with Ezra’s heroic assistance) doing the harassing and manipulating and disrespecting, is the worst kind of #MeToo-able boss character. It’s just...I mean, read the room, author. Seriously. Who wants to read about this? Who wants to treat a bumbling sh*tty man as redeemable solely because he has power in 2020?
All of which is to say: Monty is a butthead.
And Ben, a single dad who has the misfortune of being a regular at the coffee shop where Evie often shows up to do her daily buttface-ing, is a personality-less doormat too, so I guess he and Evie have something in common.
(I ran out of butt-related insults, which is fine, because Ben is nothing. He neither deserves nor doesn’t deserve a butt-themed moniker.)
I just...did not like this at all. I hated a lot, and everything I didn’t hate was bland.
Bottom line: A butt-book.
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it's actually a good sign for how my brain is doing when i'm only capable of reading romance. definitely not a cry for help that every single book i read has to have a happily ever after