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ok...so I'm 75% in and think I'm going to abandon this. This is the first McQuiston that isn't for me. I think this will be a book for many ppl but not me. Trigger warning for alcoholic levels of drinking porn and a kink built around bullying.

There's no plot. It drags and drags, through two people longing for a former relationship, putting each other on pedastals, and then having what I can best describe as obnoxiously horny sex 24/7. There is so much sex and it becomes so incredibly boring and monotonous. They're mean to each other, which I think is their kink, so go off queens, but it's too intimate for me to be comfortable with reading. This review is gonna sound so fucking pearl clutchy in regards to the sex and I swear I'm not but I do have boundaries. GenZ is gonna hate this book, the sex is gratuitously over the top and excessive. I absolutely signed up for queer sex in a McQuiston book but...not this. My approach might have been different if this was clearly marketed as erotica with what's supposed to be Call Me By You Name longing (which is also excessive and doesn't hit.) They're almost 30 but act 21 in both their characters and their horniness. Again, there are going to be readers who absolutely look for this in their books, and no shame to them, but it's not working for me when it's framed as a queer romance, I expect a lot more plot and structure than this. ("But the blurbs says they're sleeping their way across Europe," you say, "you should have known!" I was certainly prepared but not for this. I'm uncomfortable with how embedded this behavior is in both self harm and intentional harm of the other person.) Also, hot take, I'm tired of gay culture being built around and celebrated for sex, especially embedded in masculine energy and approach to sex. But that's a discussion for another day.

They're very obnoxious people, both are entitled, perfect, nepo babies and this book is trying to say "nepo babies are people too!" And, yeah, they are, but they're also incredibly privileged and rich and that removes any literary tension from the story. Like, I don't care that Theo learns their bar-bus-business is going under and they suddenly have credit card bills - so do we all - but they have incredibly wealthy family offering to bail them out, so where is the crisis? The worst thing that has happened to these two is a miscommunication that led to a breakup. And I'm supposed to feel it's incredibly tragic? There's A LOT of telling and not showing of how tragic their breakup was, of how they loved each other and put one another on these incredibly high pedastals. I'm not finishing this because I'm tired of hearing Theo describe the perfection that is Kit again and again as they voyeuristically watch him.

I'm so bored. I'm so bored with all of the sex and the alcohol and the perfect privileged people whose love I can't buy into.