Story of my Life is a book that isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It’s goofy, silly, at times a little ridiculous but that’s also what makes it so entertaining and funny.

I really enjoyed how the sibling relationship between Cam, Levi, Gage and Laura was shown and just how realistic it felt. From bickering with your siblings to insulting them in their face and praising them behind their back, being annoyed with them 24/7 but also be willing to do anything and everything for them. It was such a funny dynamic to read and made the characters a little more real.

The chemistry between Hazel and Cam was a little lacking imo and most of their romantic/sexual interactions didn’t feel natural nor like they were driven by love and sometimes not even lust. Some of their moments together came a little out of nowhere without any thoughts first about how they felt about each other before actually making whatever moves. Even at the end of the book, I still don’t think there was a clear indication of why Hazel and Cam liked each other romantically, besides just being sexually attracted to each other.

I think a big reason for this is because the book tries a little too hard to be a comedy. I did really enjoy the humor present and I laughed quite a bit, but a lot of times it prioritizes making the characters act funny and say funny things and lighten the mood with jokes rather than expand on the emotional connection between the characters and focus on individual character development.

I would usually hate with a burning passion a grumpy mmc that can be rude, pushy and possessive, but I actually didn’t mind Cam too much here. It helped that the fmc doesn’t get swayed by this, she’s always ready to match his tone or just completely ignore him and that created an interesting dynamic with a fun banter. Though I still didn’t like how he always felt the need to jump to conclusions and resolve problems with fighting, that just felt immature.

Hazel does suffer a little from “not like other girls” syndrome, but I didn’t really feel like it was too predominant for her as a characters to the point of not liking her because of it. A lot of times she’s different, but in an interesting way or making me question and be interested in knowing how she’ll solve her conflicts in her own way. She’s also very resilient, ready to communicate instead of leaving things unsaid, and I really appreciated that about her.

As expected, this did not need to be 500 pages long. There’s a lot of repetition of same conversations over and over again, I felt like the pacing was a little slow and focused too much on some scenes that didn’t need to be that long, conflicts that went on for so long with no reason for it. This really affected how I felt about the book in the end cause it just started to get tiring to read.

With so much respect to V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, it’s bluntly obvious thriller/mystery is not their usual genre to write in. It felt like their focus when writing this book was on the commentary around the publishing industry and its hardships, which I do think was important here, but the mystery aspect was left to the side when this was supposed to be, in fact, a mystery book.

The premise is interesting and the book has a nice introduction that makes you want to feel invested in the mystery and who’s going to come out victorious in the end, but so much happens in the meantime that deviates from what was the initial plot and it just gets messy. The plot is not cohesive, it has no structure and it doesn’t feel like it has a purpose. There were a lot of moments that I would hope something would happen and when it did… it brought nothing to the story. Sure, a lot of it gets explained at the end, but it doesn’t have any actual impact or reason in the moment.

The characters were such a waste and so much more could’ve been done with them. We learn so much about them, with some having such interesting backgrounds and important reasons to want to win this competition, but again none of it is actually impactful. So much time is wasted on insignificant details, so many chapters in povs of useless (and infuriating) characters, not to mention the amount of plot points that I thought were going to come up later in the book and change the trajectory of the plot but that were just forgotten and never picked up again.

All of this for an ending that isn’t even satisfactory but instead predictable and dull.