“I’d say you just love the idea of her, then, she says. You’re pinning everything on something you’ve never even had. Something that’s not real.”
Will and Rosie meet one day as teenagers at a bonfire. Will is very intrigued with Rosie and a tense “will they, won’t they?” relationship develops between them. As they get closer and get to know each other over secret walks, runs, phone calls and text messages, they seem destined to end up together, at least for a while. One day though, at Will’s birthday party, which Rosie and her twin brother sneaked out to attend, tragedy strikes, and their future together suddenly seems impossible.
“She thinks she loves Simon, and she knows he loves her, but sometimes she wants him to look at her like he could eat her; wants him to touch her in a way that means she feels wanted, instead of just cared for. But he sips wine and talks and smiles with all his teeth and passes carrots across the table.”
If you’re a fan of Sally Rooney, this is the perfect book for you. Honestly, this sometimes felt like Normal People fanfiction to me and I say fanfiction because it is not as good as Normal People. I’m sure Daverley knows she’s going to get this comparison a lot. Also, when did it become the cool girl thing to write dialogue without any punctuation? This is also something Rooney is very fond of doing.
Anyway, this book is sad girl literature. It is a Taylor Swift song in book form. Shy, smart girl who is under her parents’ thumb being pursued by the resident school bad boy who is also secretly smart, and secretly soft (but of course, only soft for our heroine) and talks about how cool it is not to want to go to university.
I really wanted to like this book because I’m a sucker for a love story that is built entirely on sexual tension but there was nothing here. I didn’t like any of the characters. I didn’t root for them to be together, I just kept waiting for it all to be over. Also, the author just decided to throw every trauma at them to make them more interesting but all the traumas in the world won’t make one dimensional characters feel any more real. Trigger warnings abound in this book – child abandonment, death, OCD, food issues, weight issues, coming out as gay, cancer, alcoholism and the list goes on.
This is a debut novel so I do believe that Claire Daverley has the potential to be a fantastic author but I hope she knows she doesn’t have to convince us that she can write and she needs to figure out how to tell a good story without drowning us in flowery language. Everyone knows I’m a sucker for a good quote from a book but I also need to connect to the characters in order to be able to connect to the beautiful language. This was my problem with Rooney’s last book too, give me characters that I can recognize. I don’t have to relate to characters in the books I read but you have to convince me that these characters exist somewhere in the world for me to connect with the story.
All in all, because this was a debut novel and I grade all debut novels on a curve, I ended up giving this 3 stars on Goodreads. I sincerely cannot wait to see what Daverley writes next.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 