I think I’m late to the party, but I recently finished this book and was surprised at how underwhelming it felt. I honestly loved this book from the start and was heavily invested by the middle. I think there is so much in the book that is well done, and I really liked Evelyn’s character and thought her voice and perspective were interesting.
I think the ending felt predictable, but worse than this is just kind of felt like it didn’t have the impact on me that the author intended.
How did you guys feel about this book? I think overall I liked the characters and the major themes, but I just felt like the ending missed the mark for me.
by YearOneTeach
5 Comments
I think the book was actively terrible and the author clearly wanted to just write a generic Hollywood story But Diverse while being ill equipped to write actual diversity.
I thought the ending was extremely predictable, as well, BUT it was also a gut punch in bad way. The author throws in a random line about the ~irony of Evelyn’s breasts killing her and it just felt so vindictive and hateful that it was borderline misogynistic.
Extremely mediocre book that offended me enough to descend even below the mediocrity of the prose.
I didn’t think the writing was particularly good, to be honest. I felt like the overall concept was great but the characters just felt sort of two-dimensional and flat to me. I think if I’d read this book at 18 I probably would have loved it.
I DNF’d it out of boredom.
I wasn’t a huge fan.
I felt the marketing leaned heavily on the ‘celebrity sensation’, which I got a lot more of in Daisy Jones.
I think a more straightforward story of Celia and Evelyn would’ve been much more impactful than what we were presented with. I thought the character Evelyn would be a lot more subversive for the time, but instead much of the book is just a series of marriages interspersed with the f/f romance. The whole thing felt gimmicky, shallow (story-wise) and not very memorable.
It’s been a few years. As I recall, it came off as a not so great variation on The [insert number] [blank] of [insert name]. Seemed very contrived at the time.
This trope came into publishers’ sights after [blank] on a [blank].
Variations on a theme can work well in music, but rarely in novels.