ok I have a lot of opinions about this book but let’s start with the positives: it was honestly a very fun and light read. It’s very much your typical hate-to-love romance with miscommunication and misunderstandings and at times very absurd but I also think that’s what made it so entertaining. I was always expecting something ridiculous to happen to add fire to the drama and see where the characters would take it, and how that’d impact Joonie as someone in the middle of a romance but also someone on a journey.

Along with Joonie’s story, we’re given excerpts of the romantasy book that Joonie’s life revolves around - A Tale of Salt Water & Secrets - and I’m not gonna lie, there was a point where I was a lot more invested in this story than of the main character. There’s an element of satire in the romantasy sections, with even the author saying she’s choosing to parody these parts, and using every common and cliche trope we’re used to seeing in fantasy romance books that make these so popular, and it’s this absurdity that made reading these sections so fun.

With the main story of the book… I just didn’t feel the same. I was very hopeful with the author’s note, where Iman Hariri-Kia mentions the discrimination that romance readers get, how they have this awful reputation that they only read for smut, that it’s not real reading and that romance readers are delusional, when in reality romance novels can be a way to escape but also for people to understand themselves and their sexuality when their own education fails to help in that, which I agree with. However, the author fails to make Joonie follow these lines and instead turns her into the stereotype she’s trying to go against. She’s delusional and obsessed and a crazy fan, which until here I wasn’t minding, it’s a very realistic portray of some people in fandoms and that’s completely fine, it was even interesting how the author decided to lean into that aspect, but it’s the actions she takes and the way she thinks that take her to an absurd level.

You can’t make your character complain that people don’t take her seriously because they think she can’t distinguish fiction from reality and then make her take actions where she does not, in fact, know where the line is between fiction and reality. She’s constantly comparing her life to the book she’s obsessed with, how the people in her life parallel with the characters, I mean she’s literally stalking someone that she doesn’t know and that the person doesn’t know her just because it inspired her favorite character and she wants to romance that person. It just doesn’t work when you’re trying to prove a point and the main character does the exact opposite of what you’re trying to prove.

I understand this is supposed to be satire and there’s a lot that happens that goes in line with that, but there’s also so much contradiction that it cancels the message the author is trying to convey. I genuinely connected with what Iman Hariri-Kia talked about in the author’s note that I assumed the rest of the book would follow that line of thought.

the problem with this book is that it tries to be too many things at once: a romance novel (which it does a perfectly solid job of being), a satire (nonexistent), camp (incoherently so; it takes itself too seriously for that), and a romantasy parody (actually moderately successful).

given that i am not an avid (english) romance reader, i was most interested in the satire and camp that we were promised in the author's notes, only to have this book fall short of even my most generous expectations not even a third of the way in. i'm not sure if the author has ever read a satirical work, but the didactic tangents she has her main character go on throughout the novel end up bringing down the otherwise rather silly tone of this book, which then warps her attempt at satire. you can't have a satirical work that takes itself too seriously. satire is meant to be exaggerated and ridiculous, and it is through that exaggeration and ridicule that the things we take for granted about our society are reflected back at us, thereby allowing us to see beyond the illusion to recognise our own errors. if the satire works, we don't need the main character to lecture us on what we're supposed to see—it'll be obvious to us through the text itself. as you might expect, the so-called camp of this novel also suffers for this constant tonal whiplash, which is a pity because there were so many scenes that could've otherwise played perfectly into that (the prophecy joonie receives on the train to nyc, for one).

furthermore, the author actually undermines her own argument through her simultaneous attempts to lecture the reader and satirise contemporary derision towards romance lovers. joonie states early in the novel that "nothing drives [her] further up the wall than when people, especially straight, cisgender white men, act like romance readers can’t differentiate between reality and fiction." yet, merely two paragraphs later, she's already wondering if her entire life was "an elaborate way for destiny to lead [her] to meet [her] soul mate," the real-life man who inspired her favourite book boyfriend. the entire argument of this book lost all coherence in this moment, and it just keeps happening! either lean into the delusion and satirise it, or write the poignant love letter to romance readers you so clearly want to. you can't have an in-between without compromising the efficacy of either form.

the romantasy parody was actually moderately successful, but i'm of the opinion that it should've been cut entirely or turned into its own novel. the halving of the novel between the actual storyline and the romantasy novel that joonie is so obsessed with results in the halving of both their stories as well: in the literal meaning of the "excerpts" we get from the merman romantasy novel, both stories feel incomplete and extremely rushed. the merman romantasy wasn't even linked properly to joonie's story beyond providing the background context for her obsession, so it felt as though i was reading two separate stories that were only tangentially connected.

(also, i think that focusing her love of romance novels so entirely on this one romantasy book works to the detriment of the author's defence of the genre as well. it would've been more interesting and well-rounded had joonie referenced a variety of romance novels from all sorts of subgenres, or even just multiple romantasy novels. the merman romantasy could've still been the central focus, but eliding even a single mention of all other romance novels just seems to me a strange choice.)

anyway, onto the actual romance! it is extremely clichéd, and cheesy, and overblown, but it leans into all that deliberately out of love for the genre, so i actually did somewhat like it. or i did when i wasn't dying out of secondhand embarrassment, which wasn't often. there were some parts i really didn't like though, namely the third-act conflict and the whole background to why joonie and nico started the novel so at odds with each other. i thought it was ridiculous that joonie was still trying to stalk the real-life inspiration for her book boyfriend; it read like a poor justification for the third-act conflict/break-up that's so common in english romance novels. the author's attempt to parody the typical romance structure with this doesn't work either, simply coming off as awkward and abrupt (the entirety of chapter 17 is a single line: "I hate third-act conflict." so why are we doing this then? it makes no sense).

similarly, i didn't like any part of nico's justification for why he keeps antagonising joonie (pulling a girl's pigtails? really?), nor was i impressed with his perspective of the incident that caused their fall-out. it read as a cheap way to excuse his treatment of joonie, especially given how he faces no real consequences for it in the text after the reveal. or maybe i'm just not a fan of how this background is clearly just meant to set up the assholes-to-lovers pipeline that every single book in this quest is so obsessed with.