I have such mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it's very well written and engaging enough for me to read the entire thing pretty much in one afternoon. On the other thing, it left me mostly annoyed, because I kind of hated the characters. AND they weren't interesting enough (and much too predictable in their tragic pathos) to override the hatred either.
So I'm splitting the difference in my rating and trying to write down some of my thoughts about the book, all the while very aware that to say anything negative about a book that deals with such hot topics as race and #MeToo is to pretty much a crime or at the very least a misdemeanor, and yet ... (Oh, yeah, reader beware, crucial plot points will be discussed below, so proceed accordingly.) While the author uses race in a mostly cogent and relevant manner, her implications of abuse don't quite ring true. This may and likely will vary from reader to reader, but the book I read told a story of a presumably intelligent young woman who makes a series of misguided/stupid/reckless choices to orbit an unavailable and possibly not even a very nice man. The man is an author to whom she writes a fawning letter in college and proceeds to fangirl over him for the next decade to the detriment of her own personal development and life. The author is never anything other than himself, which is insecure noncommittal mess, dining out for entirely too long on the same novel, because he has managed to tap into a rare Latin American market. Throughout the course of their relationship, despite the very rare sex, there aren't really any romantic undertones. It's more of a somewhat toxic codependency that the protagonist takes much too far. It is very obvious to everyone but her that he isn't the kind of man she can have a future with. Entirely unsuitable as a romantic partner, in the end, he isn't even a good friend. But in the meanwhile, he does pay off 20K of the protagonist's college loans and flies her out routinely to interesting destinations, all of which she gladly accepts. So exactly how sorry are we supposed to feel for her when she decides to revisit their relationship some years later in light of recent abuse allegations from another woman and recast herself as a victim? It's entirely too easy to rewrite history; one's own and others, much easier than to take responsibility for it. But which protagonist are we reading? Someone with agency and character or a tagalong pushover? Which does she want to be? Because she can't really be both. In the end, so much of her focus - of her life -revolves around this author that it rather seems that her being used as a character in his novel (as morally reprehensible as it is) may actually be the most interesting thing and the grandest accomplishment of her life. Which is, of course, its own tragedy. Thanks Netgalley.
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