On paper, this sounded like a book that I would love. I genuinely feel sorry to say that this book is just…not very good.

First of all: The book is not being marketed accurately. It has a literary cover, but the writing is neither beautiful nor insightful. The publisher lists Torrey Peters as a comp, which, I’m sorry, but no. Torrey Peters’s work has clear reasons for being set in the 21st century. Torrey Peters’s work has really smart, complex, interesting things to say about contemporary queer culture. This book…does not. This book is just like “hey it sucks that homophobia and transphobia exist.” Yes it does suck that homophobia and transphobia exist! But is that all you have to say on the matter? I certainly don’t think that all books with queer main characters have to say smart things about queer culture. But if yours doesn’t, don’t comp it to Torrey Peters.

In fact, the book doesn’t have particularly smart things to say about much of anything. It’s full of platitudes such as:

-“It’s not always easy, but we are all on our own journeys.”
-“But people, they were capable of change.”
-“His feelings, his reaction to what had happened, were valid.”
-“One thing [sports] represented was patriarchy.”
-“He thinks about […] society’s toxic masculinity, how it can lead someone to committing so many wrongs” (Wow, toxic masculinity is bad? You don’t say.)

The book basically has no plot until almost halfway through. To be fair, you eventually realize that the first half is setting up some important reveals in the second half, but the first half still *feels* as though it has no plot. Credit where credit is due: One of the big reveals is something that I did not predict but that seems obvious in retrospect, which is exactly what I want in a reveal, so kudos for that.

The contemporary setting clashes with the gothic aesthetic, and not in a fun way. It’s not that I think gothic fiction with smartphones can’t be done (I think The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton does it well, for example), but in this book the two elements never really feel integrated with each other. It feels as though the book was mashed together out of two very different books, one historical fiction and one (under-developed) contemporary romance. Normally I like books that are hard to categorize genre-wise, but this book just doesn’t execute it satisfyingly. I can’t think of anything the modern setting adds to the story; all it does it detract from the aesthetic with mentions of Facebook. I do not want the words “herstory” or “sliding into their DMs” in my gothic fiction.

To be clear, it’s not that I inherently dislike internet in my fiction. There are books I love that are very much about internet culture (e.g. How to Repair a Mechanical Heart). But this book isn’t thematically interested in internet culture; nor is the internet truly crucial to any major plot point. The internet doesn’t really do anything here except kill the vibe (or at least, like, periodically intrude to injure the vibe), and this is the kind of book you read primarily for the vibe.

Books I would use as comp titles for this book: A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, and Uncommon Charm by Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver, even though those are both historical fantasy and this book is neither historical nor fantasy. This book feels like it wants to be, or ought to be, historical and/or fantasy; it feels like maybe it used to be, in an earlier draft, and then was changed to contemporary for reasons that elude me.

The romance fell flat for me. I like stories about messy queer characters making bad decisions, but the love interest here is just a shitty person, and I was not rooting for the main character to end up with him, especially when there are multiple other potential love interests hinted at. I like stories about fucked-up relationships (like These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever, or Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier), and I like cute romances, but I do not like when it’s a fucked-up relationship but the book seems to think it’s a cute romance. It irritated me that when the love interest tells the main character about something that happened that is clearly an Everyone Sucks Here situation, the main character interprets it as a firmly Not The Asshole situation instead. And the main character and the love interest just have little to no chemistry.

Also, if you are tired of stories about queer couples who fight because one of them wants to be out and one of them doesn’t, this may not be the book for you.

I'm afraid I couldn't get past the first few pages. Two reasons:

1. Multiple words are misused even in that short stretch: "foliage ... fallen into a *pyre* at the base of [a tree] trunk" (nothing is on fire); collarbones described as "sharp, rung" (what?); "something feminine loitered at the core of his character" (loitered? again, what?); "boys at St. Mary's developed that bisexual instinct that traverses such English institutions (for "traverses," "permeates" is surely meant) ... that was as much as I could stand.

2. This is supposed to be a novel, not a gender studies term paper. Of course someone can come to understand the concept of performing gender thanks to reading Judith Butler, but please don't give me a potted precis of Butler and call that characterization.