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I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a book less this year.

When I read the first thirty percent of the book I was bored and skeptical that I was going to enjoy the book, but I was fairly confident that I’d be able to give it an average rating. At that point I hadn’t actually found anything that was actually upsetting I just found both POV characters to be a little boring and not people I was invested in. That said, I did initially enjoy the group dynamic that the book set up at the game shop.

Then Albert systematically eliminated every potential side character in the most comedic of ways and left me alone for the bulk of the book with these two characters.

To me it never read like either of the characters really grew from their experience being together, it was reall more like at some point you have to just get over that this is the person that you’re stuck with for the week and get over it. I never felt the chemistry between them and I really only wanted them to bone so that perhaps something exciting might happen.

A lot of the complaints I had about the book are rather petty, so I won’t spend time on them here. And I will take time to recognize that Conrad didn’t map the trip, but the idea that this man was so bent on not seeing his relatives in Kansas and still signed on for a trek through the state when alternate routes were certainly available was a choice, as was visiting Denver when the book talks about how he had bad experiences with his asthma there as a child and yet was still caught off guard.

All of the things that popped up to inconvenience the characters of this story felt incorporated in such an obvious way that robbed them of feeling like a moment that I could actually enjoy.

The most glaringly bad thing about the book was the voice. It read so young for something with protagonists as old as they were. I can respect a chaste romance, and I can respect not having lots of graphic sex scenes, but this book needed something. It constantly felt like the narrative was talking down to the reader, as though it was trying to market to a teen audience the boring love story of two men in their mid twenties, it was just not something that worked. Then to make things worse the final three chapters almost definitely felt tacked on, from the weirdly constructed fade to black sex scene to the odd time skip to the fact that this is mareketed on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ as the first in a series when the book goes out of its way to not include any kind of meaningful side characters and sitting through more of Conrad and Alden’s sotry is the last thing I’d want to do.