So I got this kind of personal “challenge” where I read books that fictional characters of shows/movies I like are shown reading. I read On The Road because Don Draper was reading it during one scene in Mad Men
I’m telling this to explain that the only reason why I bought this book is because Shiv Roy was reading it during the beach scene in Succession. That was literally the only information I had about this book or Rooney’s work
I just finished it and I actually liked it, but reading some older posts here on Reddit I noticed that most people actually hate it, and I am curious because I thought it was a pretty good book. Not a masterpiece by any means but also not a piece of garbage
I saw a lot of people commenting about how all the characters are unlikable and I’m not really sure if that’s a good enough reason to say something is “bad”. Not saying people can’t deslike something because of it, but it feels a somewhat “shallow” critique to me. Books/movies/etc can be great even if every character in it is a horrible person (like I mentioned, I like Sucession).
I actually related a lot to Frances (in some ways I didn’t particularly like) but I didn’t like her very much. Although the one character I really desliked was Bobbi
The other critique I see most often is that the book is pretentious. I definitely agree that Bobbie and Frances are super pretentious (one of the main reasons why I didn’t like Bobbi), but all the time I thought that we, as the readers, were suppose to feel this way about all those superficial conversations about Marxism. I don’t know if that was the author’s intention, but that was how I felt
by BroaDeMilhoEmtoBom