Ally’s Reviews > You, Again > Status Update

"I know, I feel you, you're so close."

[this would immediately kill the vibe for me]

"We fit together. We literally fit together."

[& this, yikes]

"We're so good for each other."

[on a first time. yep, heck no.

I don't need romance characters to be like me or be my type, banter that would put me off can be fine... but a sex scene that wouldn't do it for me casts a shadow over the book - why is that?]

"You feel so good," she whispers. "God, you feel so good." Her vocabulary is also operating at a first-grade level.

[NO, JESUS, DO NOT PUT THE WORD "FIRST-GRADE" ON THE SAME PAGE AS PENETRATION. And I thought the "burst of serotonin" / "pleasure centers of the brain light up like neon" prose was a vibe killer.]

There's this idea of her that exists in his mind, where she's some kind of enigma, where the passcodes are always off by one number, where she almost opens up, but not quite. [...] Josh is good at memorizing these things.

[I understand what this is aiming at, intense attention + competence is a hot fantasy, but in my actual life it's very not hot when someone treats my orgasm as a puzzle - turned off by this]

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please”

[aha! trans rep!]

But when Josh finally emerges from the back, there’s a contemplative look on his face, like he’s trying to crack Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

[the simile references in this book are utterly bizarre choices - does anyone in this scene care about math? WTH was the Mario/Luigi simile a chapter ago?]

He can't quite feel the beat, but he can feel her breathing.

[oh great, he can't even dance]

"You're the only person I'm nice to. If you weren't around, I'd have no redeeming qualities."

[true. so far this is successfully hitting all the notes of 80s/90s rom-coms including that the girl could do sooooo much better than this schlub.]

...an affirmation. A mantra from one of Cass's self-help books.

[ok, oops, Cass is just cis and tall, us selling self-help books is just too implausible]

...Cass asks in her sexy, husky voice. She sounds like an old-school country singer that's had too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

[um... tall Brooklyn loft party queer theory adjunct that 'looks like someone from a prestige drama' is which tgirl exactly?]

"The Symposium? Aristophanes' speech?"

[we shall forgive that narrator Kristen DiMercurio can't say Aristophanes right... but also this was done way better in The Half of It, which Kate Goldbeck cannot have missed. This is almost as contrived as the haha leftist girl sequence that led here.]