so so excellent! the characters are adorable and this volume gave me everything i wanted, from individual growth to relationship development. the way so so excellent! the characters are adorable and this volume gave me everything i wanted, from individual growth to relationship development. the way d&d is used as both a bonding experience and a metaphor is super entertaining.
Molly Knox Ostertag is a graphic novel legend in the making, and i think Xanthe Bouma’s illustration work is genuinely unparalleled (see also: the Five Worlds series)....more
Baby’s first Emily Henry! I read this at lightspeed fueled by sheer “put those two in a situation!� energy. But because it’s a contemporary romance anBaby’s first Emily Henry! I read this at lightspeed fueled by sheer “put those two in a situation!� energy. But because it’s a contemporary romance and not a fanfic, I guess, those two were not put in a situation very often. Mostly they were put in 400 conversations that all sounded like cognitive behavioral therapy. This is unfortunate, because if CBT has no haters, I’m dead.
For one thing, I’m just much more interested in real problems and tangible choices than navelgazing about patterns of distorted thinking. I wanted to see Daphne and Miles do the fake dating at our exes� wedding thing, which I thought was the premise of the book, but it is not, because no such wedding was attended.
And I get the CBT-esque paradigm here, that healing = rewriting your mental narratives of your own inadequacy. But there’s something torturous to me about seeing a person’s psyche spelled out in plain terms of cause and effect, with one-to-one lines traced from each of their fears and priorities back to the traumatic familial/romantic relationships of their past. (ex. She’s obsessed with calendars because her dad was always flaky.)
This pendulum-swing model of the self reduces new relationships, romantic and platonic, to montages of “opening up� to reveal the origin stories of one’s flaws. I want to know what lies beyond the limits of self-awareness, beyond the articulable. I can’t get that from a story where characters never connect with each other (I’m talking platonic hang-outs, dates, sex) without an admirably functional communication of boundaries between both parties beforehand. The emotional world of the novel is neatly confined to what the characters know they want and are willing to admit they want out loud. This is very politically correct and also inconceivably unrealistic.
Is this Emily Henry’s fault? Or is this just what contemporary romances are like? I think I’ve DNF’d, for similar reasons of millennial therapyspeak, every book in the genre I’ve tried to read since Red, White, & Royal Blue came out (which was plot-heavy + perfectly targeted at me when I was a bisexual DC kid under the first trump admin). So I mean it when I say Henry deserves her flowers for making this book unputdownable despite the bones I have to pick with everything that it is....more
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