If you are also chronically online: picture the millennial cringe compilations, sprinkle in some forced polyamory, and you've got yourself Adult Braces.

It's hard to overstate how bad this book is. It's a train wreck, in every way possible. I ate it up. You ever accidentally put on a low budget streaming service movie that's not trying to be satire but is unintentionally so funny, and you know its bad but its so bad its good? Yeah, that's this experience.

Lindy West has no sense of self, but she'll try to convince you that her month-long cross country roadtrip made her... checks notes.... Accept her husbands emotional betrayals, become OK third-wheeling in her own marriage, go from not being able to walk up a hill to going on regular runs, realize people from Red states are humans too, and stop being a people pleaser by getting a septum piercing.

Have to hand it to her for the leftist-slop political ramblings though, I never knew someone could argue for 10 minutes that “the ongoing project of global white supremacist imperialism” will be solved if white people just learned how to dance (yes this is a real take).

how does one write a novel about the god of desire falling madly in love with a mortal woman and make it utterly unromantic?

This book is a disaster for two reasons: The book itself, and the bastardization of the myth.

The Book: The first quarter had some momentum and was likely edited 15x more than the rest of the book. In the initial chapters Eros had depth and charm; Psyche was boring from the get-go but since she was a child I forgave her. Fast forward to the so-called romance (yes, Psyche is an adult at this point) and the entire book fell apart.

There was literally no emotion between Eros and Psyche. Like, I cannot emphasize this enough. The only specificity Eros has when it comes to his affection for Psyche is that she looks cute when she sleeps despite also being a drooling, sorta ugly sleeper. I shit you not.

The Myth: This is NOT A RETELLING. This is pure fantasy. And I have a BONE TO PICK. Psyche is iconic. She is PSYCHE. I get wanting to create feminist retellings, but why do we have to give Psyche made-up male characteristics to make her powerful? The Psyche in this book is a wannabe warrior monster-slayer, which has zero basis in tradition. It's borderline misogynistic the way all of her femininity was stripped and replaced with Hercules-type traits and storylines.

Then there's the made-up family trees and timelines (Psyche is Clytemnestra's niece and witnesses the soldiers go off to Troy?? what?). Genuinely I think the author did this because the actual myth has no "fan favorite" characters from other hit retellings, so she forced Achilles, Patroclus, Atalanta, Elektra, Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra into the narrative. Oh, don't forget Medusa. The whole fam's here.

I do have to give this book its flowers for inspiring me to write a real Psyche and Eros retelling. The world deserves a reckoning.