I gotta say I’m utterly baffled by the random third act wereowl (?????) reveal. By the end of this book I was also confused why the author didn’t just write her own original regency characters. We’re deviating so much from the idea of a comedy of manners romance, so why not just do your own thing. I think what really made this a two star for me though was the clunky climax. Why were there so many fires? I think P&P sequels/spin offs just work better for me when they’re grounded in a genre like romance or mystery.

I think that this is a very important story that needs to be told, however I question if this was the right author to tell it. We could have a whole discussion about own voices and who gets to write about what culture, but my main issue is her lack of strong authorial voice. Fadiman has embedded herself into the story and yet she attempts to keep a more neutral perspective. That choice is detrimental to the story/material presented. I’ve seen many reviews that frame this as a cultural clash where both sides are equally wrong, which ignores the power imbalance at play. Racism, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism are directly tied to the oppression of the Hmong and subsequently Lia’s death. I just don’t think that this author has the guts or the radical politics to really address these issues in the way that she should. It became extremely obvious to me that she couldn’t critique these structural problems when Palestine was briefly mentioned in an anecdote. When Fadiman discusses Israel and Palestine she frames Palestinians as the aggressors and the Israelis as the oppressed. This put a bad taste in my mouth as the Hmong who she sympathizes with are far more similar to the Palestinians. I couldn’t help but think about the Nakba when Fadiman described the Hmong trek across Laos. All I wanted to do after finishing this book was to read some Ta-Nehisi Coates cause he knows how to tell a story while having radical political beliefs.

The structure of this book is also a mess. This was Fadiman’s first published book and you can tell she wasn’t sure how to distribute the historical and narrative material throughout the story. I couldn’t understand why she chose to have a documentary where are they now style section and then continue to write 2-3 more chapters. It just made the ending really drag when we could have finished on an emotional punch. I was also baffled by the choice of having the discussion about framing and word choice from the 2012 revisitation as an afterword. I was quite uncomfortable with the use of slurs throughout the text and I’m sure there are people who may have DNF’d for that reason. It would have positively enhanced the reading experience to have that discussion from the author up top.

I think there’s an important story here, but if you want to learn about the Hmong or structural racism read something else. It just feels notable to me that this book by a white author is such uplifted text about this issue instead of a book by non-white author.

I had a pretty good time with this book but there were just some moments where the cringe factor became too strong. A second chance romance is always gonna be a hit for me and reuniting with your childhood crush who you didn’t know what queer is just delectable. I’m also a big fan of how this book directly addressed issues like body dysmorphia among queer men. Ramin struggles with his body but he’s also in therapy, so he takes the steps to refute that negative self talk. Therapy doesn’t magically heal your neuroses and it feels realistic that Ramin has to work at it. Recently I’ve been thinking about the popular MM books and how it can exclude aspects of the queer man experience to make things more glamorous. This book isn’t gritty or anything, but sometimes the sex is a little awkward or bodies do embarrassing things. It made the story feel very human and sweet.

As far as things that didn’t work, I think this author fell into a very common trap when writing kids in books. At times Noah’s son acted far too young and it made things feel disjointed. I also really struggled with parts of this book that were insanely cringe. Part of this may be due to the fact that I picked this up on audio and that further pronounced the cringe. There were some lines that gave me such second hand embarrassment the I had to pause the book and take a lap.

Overall, this was a perfectly fun read and it may work better in a non-audio format. I think this could be a really fun summer read with the whole Italian setting.

I just did not care for this book. The biggest problem for me was that I didn't believe in/root for the romance. Oliver felt pretty boring and underdeveloped as a character, I couldn't have told you much about his personality or goals except that he wants to win football games. I think that Oliver's nothing character could have worked better if this book was dual POV because then we would have been able to see him from Leo's perspective. What really kept the romance from working for me was Leo as a character. He was just written in a way that made him read extremely young and childlike. As a reader, I just didn't get why Leo would be interested in Oliver because he was immediately combative when they met and didn't have a glowing personality that was later revealed. Leo's happy go lucky attitude and Oliver's go girl give me nothing energies did not mesh into anything compelling.

I also struggled with the football scenes having no momentum or energy. I've read multiple baseball romances that I love because of how they add tension to the sport, but anytime we were on the field I had the urge to begin skimming.

Finally, the out of the blue coming out at the end felt underexplored. We've spent so much of the text talking about how Oliver fears being outed because of how it will alter his public image and we barely do anything with that. Having to watch Oliver work through new public pressure and a need to be in fourth place to keep his position on the team would have been a much more layered plot. This was just so boring to me I don't think I'd really recommend it.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Yeah this was just a massive trudge. I think that the main problem with this book is the world building that just feels divorced from logic. The poison girls are basically glorified poison tasters so the religious stigmatization didn’t really make sense to me. The dislike for these women was because the religious sect feels negatively about the aristocracy. It just felt like the hatred was being placed on the poison girls so we could make the plot happen. I’ve heard really good things about this author’s paranormal romance though, so I’ll give that a shot sometime in the future.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.