This book was so insufferable that it took me from early June until now to finish it. I heard about it through the Discover section on the Goodreads app and it was specifically recommended for being popular on “booktok.” I don’t have Tiktok, but I’ve been aware of this book community for a while, because it’s mentioned in reviews, there are sections in bookstores designated to it, and I frequent online spaces like this community.
Anyway, this book has outrageously high reviews, and it’s fucking awful. I almost gave up finishing it so many times but after paying $19.99 for it, I was damn sure going to get to the end.
—This book is a BLATANT ripoff of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, but with subpar prose and one-dimensional characters. It has the same plot, the same characters, and a practically identical setting.
—Shakespeare should be listed as a co-author of this book, because the amount of material that was lifted from his texts was ridiculous. There were multiple unnecessarily long ass scenes depicting Shakespeare’s plays as the main characters acted them out and an egregious amount of the text was just dialogue from his works. These scenes were boring as fuck and masturbatory. We get it, ML Rio, you studied Shakespeare. The characters have a supremely annoying habit of quoting Shakespeare in practically every (not an exaggeration) regular conversation they have.
—This has to be the most male-gazey book I’ve ever read by a woman. I was stunned when I found out the author isn’t a man. There is way too much attention on the physical appearances of female characters, ESPECIALLY Meredith. Meredith two traits are being hot and being a whore (it’s what everyone sees her as, including her own friends). Every time she appears, we need another reminder that she’s sexy. We got it the first 10 times, thanks. The main character’s sister has an eating disorder and this is treated as something she should be mocked for. In fact, the protagonist DOES mock her for it in an argument, and keep in mind that his one personality trait is being “nice.”
—The big “revelation” (if you have zero braincells or reading comprehension skills, that is) has to do with the fact that the protagonist is in love with his male best friend. The author does that annoying thing where she dangles the possibility of a homosexual romance in front of the audience, but she isn’t brave enough to go all the way, and I’m not talking about sex scenes. In fact, she’s not even brave enough to just call the characters what they are: bisexual. Instead we get stupid phrases like “sexually amphibious” and “a love that transcends gender.” The author wants to play around with a LGBTQ story but she’s too cowardly to explicitly call them what they are.
—Every character has one personality trait, including one whose defining trait is not having a personality. She’s part of this group of “friends” but is hardly ever mentioned and the others don’t even know basic facts about her, like what state she lives in. It feels like ML Rio couldn’t juggle all her characters, and when she remembered that this one existed, she went back and added sentences here and there to explain why she’s never mentioned even though she’s apparently there most of the time.
—The characters are all unlikable and annoying. They’re so unlikable that it’s almost impressive. The thing is, most of them aren’t supposed to come across that way. They’re also not the fun kind of unlikable character whose adventures are fun to follow even though they suck as people — they’re the kind who are so annoying that you repeatedly put the book down because you can’t stand to be with them for long stretches of time.
—The big “murder mystery” is extremely predictable. I knew who was going to die and who the killer was like two chapters into this thing, and by extension it was very easy to figure out why the protagonist spent time in jail.
—There are extremely stupid things thrown into the book, like the killer faking his suicide a few years before the book’s present-day events. The protagonist already took the fall for you and served years in prison for the murder. Literally nobody is looking for you. Dumbass.
I’ll stop there. I just needed to get this rant out of my system. From now on, seeing that a book is popular on “booktok” is going to put it on my Probably Total Shit list.
by LostMyRightAirpods