Emmy B. > Recent Status Updates

The mystery's all right but the human drama is starting to get on my nerves.

Competent writing on the technical, putting-together-sentences level but 50 pages in the author has done nothing to endear me to any of the characters. It’s not that he made them unlikeable, just that there is a complete lack of connection. Almost like their game characters. Makes it difficult to care.

The protagonist is currently sneering at a single mother. She’s laughing at the single mum complaining about the nanny being late, by pointing out in her internal monologue the irony that she, the single mum, is late too. If the nanny was late then naturally the parent would be late too, you absolute moron. God I hate her so much.

I’m also finding the protagonist incredibly unlikable and genuinely amazingly misogynist considering it’s a woman written by a woman. I’m hoping this is on purpose and gets addressed eventually, but it’s making reading a chore atm.

I just listened to 10 minutes of the protagonist describe taking a shower. It makes me, the reader, think of this https://images.app.goo.gl/xdNACJYAfyz...

Story still good and I get the characters more but I wish the dialogue were more textured. It’s the one thing that doesn’t quite gel.

I take it back, I’m loving this.

Hm. I feel like the characters aren’t very well drawn here. Their motivations are so unclear and the decision-making so random.

The grammar in this book is weird. Is “realer” a word??

This is such a weirdly plotted book. Everything that happens feels so random which makes the pacing awkward and the emotional charge of the relationship development feel like you, the reader, are a couple of steps behind the novel.

Youth: I didn’t choose my personality.
Philosopher: Adler says you did at the age of 10.
Youth: “Adler says” is neither argument nor evidence.
Philosopher: You choose to hate me.
Youth: Had you chosen not to say dumb stuff I wouldn’t hate you.
Philosopher: I said sth dumb in the past but you choose to be annoyed now. You could be delighted instead. Ask me easy questions so I can do banal psychobabble.

Slow going. I feel like the plotlessness isn’t helping. The two protagonists are charming, I like them, but they haven’t got anything to react to or do really—nothing that feels organic, at all events.

Argh. I want to like this but so far it’s just tell no show. It’s so frustrating.

Just got to the Keanu Reeves bit and it amazes me that in a Venn diagram of people who like Chandler Bing and people who don’t get sarcasm there is this an overlap apparently 🤷‍♀️ I wouldn’t have thought this was possible but yet here we are.

Hmmm I don’t know it’s not really doing it for me. I don’t know why Mina agreed to marry the hero and so the whole thing feels painfully contrived.

I have come to the conclusion that this book would be excellent for a tv adaptation. It’s so shallow, you really could adapt it and lose nothing.

Celia: And Robert.
Evelyn: Your brother Robert??
😂 standing ovation for this novel. We know so little about Celia, basically nothing other than she’s a lesbian, she’s gingerish, an actress and her boobs aren’t as big as Evelyn’s. So that when we get to this point in the book her brother has to be introduced in this clumsy way. I cannot believe this passed some editor’s desk. I just can’t.

Celia to Evelyn: we never did tell each other lies. Let’s not start now. 😂😂 Oh book you’re killing me.

Evelyn Hugo, calculating user of people who never does anything for any reason but to enrich herself (except Celia), just married this dude who is obsessed with her boobs, for no adequate reason, without even dating him first. I guess author was running out of ideas for piling up the husbands 🤷‍♀️ who needs character consistency anyway right?

It was a big gamble of the author's to make her main character terribly unlikable and then tease you, the reader, with the prospect of finding out something unpleasant about them.

I cannot stop laughing about the bit where Evelyn Hugo describes her activism in the civil rights movement. You guys, this book, I can’t even. Just. What the hell is going on in publishing at the minute? Did someone murder all the editors? I’m concerned.

Another thing I love about this book is that if someone said to me: Emilia, write a book about a 1950s Hollywood movie star, due by the end of the month, I could write it with the exact same amount of historical detail as this book doing the sort of research you could do via quick Google search. It’s that lazy.

Also I can’t believe I still have 4 more husbands to get through 😭😭😭