around the 50% mark i started to wonder: if these are the Bad Gays, who are the Good Gays?

i feel as if the introduction and conclusion of this book was ripped and pasted in its entirety from a better, more interesting book. (nonetheless i do think the writers thought they were writing that book, and the occasional glimmers of that book are why this is a 2 star and not a 1 star review.) the introduction makes some interesting promises: pitting oscar wilde, the legendary pioneer, against his selfish miscreant lover who ruined his life, and arguing that both of these figures should be accepted as important parts of queer history. if this is the framing we’ve chosen then it’s clear: wilde is the Good Gay, and bosie is the Bad Gay. (never mind that wilde engaged in plenty of activities, like sex tourism, that the writers condemn in other chapters: it works well enough as an idea)

but aside from a couple of moments and well-chosen profiles (i particularly liked the chapter on j. edgar hoover and roy cohn), the writers are far more interested in paying lip service to this idea than actually excavating and assessing the legacies of problematic queer figures. instead they choose to retread histories that are already celebrated - james i and vi, frederick the great, t.e. lawrence - and attempt to examine their legacies and their contributions to the capitalist and imperialist constructions of power. one has to wonder why oscar wilde doesn’t make an independent appearance given his own legacy is much murkier than the introduction suggests. so, okay, the Bad Gays can sometimes overlap with the Good Gays. that’s fine. that makes sense. i guess “Powerful (often White, often Wealthy, often Male) Gays Who Exploited Others In Their Own Identity Formation” doesn’t make for as snappy of a title.

except no, that also doesn’t seem to be what the book is trying to say because we move at around the 50% mark from discussing bad people who happened to be gay and into discussing Bad Gays as a complete proper noun: gays who are bad, in large part, because they affected other gays, or because their identity was tied up in the exploitation and harm of others, or because they used their identity to legitimise their hatred. essentially their badness is inherently connected with their gayness. but then if that’s the case, why spend so much time on satirists and pornographers? why devote a chapter to ronnie kray, a man who had very little impact on wider culture in comparison to some of the other people being discussed? that’s not to mention the extremely tenuous links this book creates, jumping from idea to idea without much analysis or evaluation. (one line that stood out to me: ““Blind to the meaning of the enormous economic and racial privilege of her upbringing”, hardly developed, left to just sit there in a wider paragraph and as a moral condemnation. like oh okay. cool. do we have a source for that?)

but okay. so we’re talking about gays whose identity is founded on a basis of exploitation. sure, fair enough. i guess it makes sense why our profiles are so limited to white male figures. but then why throw in additional chapters on margaret mead and yukio mishima? why spend a chunk of this book largely about western capitalism and imperialism explaining the history of homosexuality in japan (in a hugely reductive way which serves to re-print the mythology that the writers love to condemn, that the “third world” was totally cool and fine with gays until the nasty westerners took over).

that’s not even getting into how shoddily written it is. (i almost rage-quit the book at this line: “It was that November, during the revolt, that Lawrence experienced one of his only confirmable sexual experiences […] It is difficult to make sense of the truth of this encounter” is it confirmable or not? why are we contradicting ourselves on the exact same page? as someone who is pretty familiar with t.e. lawrence i’m reasonably sure the writers meant to say that he experienced one of the only sexual experiences the celibate and potentially asexual lawrence would admit to, but if i didn’t know anything about him i’d be baffled! this doesn’t make sense! who edited this!)

it’s also not getting into how poorly researched it is. most chapters have about the depth you could get from wikipedia (and i would know, because i matched a lot of the information in the book to things i already knew. from wikipedia.) other people on this app have noted disparities in the research that are incredibly easy to notice if you’re familiar with the periods or figures being written about. many sources with questionable authorship and authority are used uncritically. (while the book regularly notes that anthropologists like margaret mead and researchers like roger casement used questionable sources to make sweeping judgements, it’s hard to take that seriously when the sources being used here are just as questionable and presented without comment.)

one of the most egregious failures to me is the chapter on yukio mishima, where the writers quote from his 1949 novel confessions of a mask to describe mishima’s early sexual awakenings. confessions contains undeniably autobiographical information, but it is still a novel: and even if you want to accept its details as fact, it feels like a wild misstep to include it in a non-fiction book without stating that these sources come from a fictionalised novel. later in the chapter, the writers make the curious choice of focusing on forbidden colors and, in more depth (including quoting from it), kyoko’s house. both of these are pretty minor works and the latter was never published in english: the quotes from the novel and the descriptions of its plot come from the biography by john nathan. given that you can find (the very homoerotic) the sailor who fell from grace in a lovely vintage classics collectors edition at most waterstones, the choice to use kyoko’s house feels a bit strange until you realise that the writers of this book have, most likely, not read any of mishima’s oeuvre other than confessions, and are working off of third hand information from one singular source. (it’s also one of the three novels that are adapted into paul schrader’s 1985 film mishima: a life in four chapters. coincidence? doubtful! of course, schrader commissioned his own translation of kyoko’s house in order to adapt it, which shows much more artistic and journalistic integrity than this chapter does.) and then this line:

The potency of his prose surely emerges from the fact that these are Mishima’s words ventriloquized.

first of all, you aren’t reading his prose. you’re reading a translation by a biographer. second of all….no? if you’re going to make the incredibly reductive claim that an author’s work consists entirely of their own words and ideas through fictional mouthpieces, you need to source that! once again going back to the writers jumping from idea to idea, making sweeping judgements and conclusions that don’t actually seem to be backed up in anything.

all of this may seem like nitpicking but really, i’m just showing the most egregious failures i noticed from the chapter i had the most prior information about. if i knew more primary information about the other figures in this book im sure i could make just as nitpicky notes on all the other chapters. unquestionably, i think if a nonfiction book falls apart the second you have more information than a wikipedia page, it has likely failed in its approach. and what an approach it is.

so again, the same question: if there are Bad Gays, surely there must be Good Gays? so who are they?

and really i can only conclude that the Good Gays are supposed to be us. the reader: or at least the book’s assumed and intended reader, which is to say white, educated, male, gay, out. (the jokes aimed directly at the reader made that pretty clear: one that stood out to me was “whose worship of masculine vitality might remind you of some Grindr profiles you’ve seen – maybe your own”, a line written about none other than nazi politician ernst röhm. sidenote: is this where james somerton got his half-remembered anecdotes about nazi fitness culture?) in order to cast judgement on a figure as a Bad Gay one must assume that the reader and writer are expected to be Good Gays: modern, liberal, flirts with leftist theory without much regard for praxis. happy to drop names like marsha p. johnson and james baldwin into conversation but with very little desire to take their ideas further. we’re too contemporary and too aware of right and wrong to have any alignment with these Bad Gays, outside of snide jokes about their sexual proclivities. (my dear friend SmallDesires posited that this might be a holdover from the book’s beginning as a podcast: likely true! i didn’t think it worked!)

it’s an insufferable and arrogant kind of approach that in my opinion can also be exceptionally harmful. we, the Good Gays, don’t have the same racist and colonial biases or the same fetishes for what we view as subaltern. we, the Good Gays, understand our identity and are flexible in its application. (other reviewers have noted this book’s propensity for bisexual and asexual erasure: a real Bad Gay bias seeping through.) we, the Good Gays, are happy to resist homophobia through solidarity. (i got a bit of a laugh when the writers state, re: the assassination of pim fortuyn, that “nonviolent activism might have” “effectively [combat] his politics”, in a book that pays lip service to civil activists, like james baldwin and audre lorde, who did not advocate for the effectiveness of nonviolent activism! truly a book by and for white men.) we, the Good Gays, criticise our heroes.

and really i became incredibly and irrevocably irritated with this book at the line:

This is rhetoric that should be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the mainstream respectability politics of gay rights movements. While a more developed analysis of sexuality (like the one we are proposing in this book) reveals otherwise, this line has always been popular for several reasons.

the utter gall of claiming your work is a “more developed analysis of sexuality” while continuing to uphold your own version of respectability and identity politics! the arrogance of stating your work is “more developed” while you retell wikipedia articles in clunky, confusing, often entirely contradictory prose. the idea that half-formed profiles with downright bad sources make up much of anything: this hardly works as an entertaining bit of pop history, much less an “analysis of sexuality”. not even touching on the fact that nothing proposed in the book is really radical or new, and instead feels half-baked, a misremembered definition of intersectionality repackaged for white gay men.

idk, maybe next time just stick with hosting your podcast?

AKA: the Snooze World of Bogus Rose 🥀 Fitting that this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling, with how much this book…put me to sleep (badum tss)

Credit where credit is due: there are some intensely, intensely compelling ideas in this book. Unfortunately, I found the execution of these ideas to be completely flat, unconvincing, tedious, frustrating, grating, irritating, disjointed, confusing, and overall nothing about the story, characters, or writing made me want to keep reading in the slightest.

Introduction

This book is advertised as a queer YA Sleeping Beauty retelling that explores themes of depression and grief, which I think is pretty accurate. Pham includes enough of the original fairytale to make this feel like a plausible retelling—one that hits marks most readers will be familiar with, from the cursed princess to the fairy godmothers and fire-breathing dragon—while making an attempt to incorporate some new and fresh ideas. There is a romance, although I would say that it is more of a primary subplot than a central plot line. The character concepts and thematic through-line are a bit more simplistic, as befitting the younger target audience, and the dual timeline and multi-POV structure is executed well, for the most part.

I will note that although I knew of Pham’s YouTube presence and platform before picking up this book, I have not watched any of her content, so I didn’t really have any pre-existing expectations based on her videos before I went into reading the ARC.

Technical Breakdown: The Good

The dream world is pure fantasy, whimsical and inventive, and Pham breathed new life into the character of Maleficent in a way that was interesting and decently compelling. I found Amelia to be written passably well in the “before” chapters, though the development of her arc and character over the course of the narrative is a separate matter. There were a few minor plot twists and reveals that I thought were surprising, fun, and well-supported by the text. There were also some genuinely lovely and poetic moments in the prose and writing itself.

The idea of escaping one’s grief by spinning a new world into existence out of dreams is something I found very poignant, and in the hands of an infinitely better writer, this could have been an amazing, powerful, and gut-wrenching book. Like, what a concept? So magical and beautiful and sad. Unfortunately, I did not think the execution landed well enough for the emotional core of the story to really shine.

Technical Breakdown: The Bad

Oh, boy. 🤡

Overview

This book felt like a textbook example of an author being so enamored with the idea of writing a certain kind of book that they completely forgot about trying to write a good story. There is so, so much heart in this book; it is written all over the underpinning ideas, the way the characters are constructed, the foundations of how the story might have been conceived in the first place…

…and the way the book insists on explaining itself to the reader at every turn. 🤡

Because I know exactly what Pham wanted readers to get out of this book, due to how everything was spelled out directly in the text, without giving the reader any room to form their own thoughts and interpretations. And frankly, this also felt like a crutch Pham was leaning on to convey what she wanted to convey—because the subtext of the writing itself was nowhere near skillful enough to get the core ideas she wanted to write about across to the reader, even when I factor in the fact that the YA target audience necessitates more direct/straightforward writing.

I can see the shape of what Pham was trying to do, but the allegory and thematic messaging—the “heart”, effectively—all get lost behind the incompetent execution of the actual components of a novel. If readers aren’t able to discern why a character is acting a certain way, or follow the basic plot of the narrative in any comprehensible manner, then the allegory of it all gets completely lost in the sauce of being confused as all hell. On a basic, fundamental level, the writing loses impact when it cannot be properly comprehended.

A good story is so much more than its heart. Things like pacing, descriptions, character dynamics, well-structured plot lines, romantic development, worldbuilding—these are the meat of the story, the skin and bones and blood that a heart needs to sustain itself. Without all of that, you get whatever the fuck this muddy, unintelligible, baffling, boring, unwieldy, clumsy, garbled Frankenstein’d mess of a story-creature was.

Prose and Writing Style

Jesus fucking christ, you all. When I say this book made me feel illiterate! I genuinely felt like I was barely skimming the book when in reality, I was reading at full concentration, focused and locked the fuck in. That’s the amount of information I was retaining at any given moment in time. 🙃🙃🙃

So, anyway. If you know me, you know I’m not one to complain about flowery prose, or writing that other people might deem “purple”. I love lush, overwrought, this-author-writes-like-they-were-paid-by-the-word kinds of descriptions. Angela “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?” Carter is one of the books in My Taste, for fuck’s sake. But uh—as with most things, I only like lush and flowery prose if it’s done well.

And let me be clear. It’s absolutely not done well here. Pham uses unintelligible, inane, vacuously ornate-sounding metaphors pretty much every 2-3 pages or so on my tiny phone screen, which means that one must pop up on every other page in the regular physical book. There are multiple levels to how these metaphors fail to be well-constructed and/or examples of good writing in general, which I’ll outline below:

1) Many of the metaphors just do not make sense on a logical level. A lot of them—not all, but definitely a lot—do nothing but obfuscate the point the text is trying to make. They’re so damn confusing and do not make any sense in the context of the sentence. Pham’s writing style can be summed up by Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, in that she fucking loves to write sentences that are “grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.” Like, did the editors actually understand half of what the book was even saying? Because I didn’t!

2) So why don’t these metaphors make sense? One thing I’ve noticed is that the writing in this book loves to languish about in nebulous “vibes”. To put it another way, the writing tries to make an association between two unlike things (AKA what metaphors do, by definition), but it does not put much effort in illuminating the how and why of the association, expecting the reader to kind of just magically fill in the blanks themselves, somehow, as they’re reading. As I’ve said in more detail elsewhere { 🫛🐝 Exclusive: such as in my review for A Dowry of Blood }, when the author uses a simile or metaphor, I view it as them drawing a connection between two dissimilar things to make a point somehow. All metaphors must be justified to some degree, since the writer is making a comparison between two unlike things and so the reason for the comparison being there should be clear to the reader. Like, why are we connecting Thing A and Thing B in the first place? What is the comparison meant to evoke?

Here, the text does a piss poor job of really clarifying the connections in the similes and metaphors Pham has insisted on stuffing into the manuscript by the boatload (while also being poorly structured and clumsily constructed in terms of the line- and paragraph-level syntax), and as a result the metaphors don’t make the writing feel “lush” or “fairytale-esque”. I do not clearly understand what feeling, emotion, association, atmosphere, etc many of the metaphors are meant to evoke, or that connection is not expressed clearly. And so I found the writing to be extremely juvenile, unpolished, incomprehensible, and frustrating…and honestly? The story would have been better off the book hadn’t tried so hard to make the writing sound poetic and impressive in this way.

{ 🫛🐝 Exclusive: I’m not including direct quotes in this review since this is for an ARC, but I posted examples of the metaphors I’m talking about in my forum posts here and here. }

Another thing of note was how strangely unhelpful a lot of the descriptions and visuals were. There was some imagery I actually did find to be quite beautiful, but that was all completely overshadowed by how difficult it was to visualize any of the scenes at a more granular and specific level. Pham provides a lot of broad details about the landscape, the sky, the light, the trees and flowers and snow and mountains, but it is not specific enough to the point of view character to really ground the reader in the scene itself. To put it another way, it felt like we were being given an aerial view of each scene, akin to an overhead photograph you might see from a drone or satellite, but it never felt properly oriented in the perspective of the POV character. Where are they standing relative to all the details about the landscape? What could they reach out and touch directly? What’s to the left and right and in front and behind? What’s one, five, ten, twenty feet away? What do they smell, hear, taste within the immediate vicinity of their surroundings?

We don’t know! Because in many cases, the book never explicitly says or makes an effort to clarify that stuff—the writing was weirdly opaque about all of that—so as a reader who tries to play back scenes in my head like a movie, I never had any idea what the hell was actually going on. Action scenes were especially egregious for this; obstacles and adversaries would just appear and disappear out of nowhere. I had no sense of what was where and how close any of the objects and landmarks were.

Beyond the awkward, repetitive syntax and poorly executed metaphors, this especially was such a strange, baffling, and extreme mistake to see in a work that has presumably been professionally edited at least once already. Like I can’t even be mad about this particular point. I’m just fucking bamboozled.

Characters and Romance

Going back to the idea that Pham was intensely enamored with writing a certain kind of story here: I felt that the main characters were not developed enough on their own, and instead they seemed like symbols of specific things the author wanted to make sure were represented in her work. Corin and Amelia are so blatantly obvious in the components of depression that they are meant to represent, and I wouldn’t care so much if any of them had any actual real sense of, you know, character development? Also neither of the MCs had any personality traits or depth other than the one (1) core defining characteristic that Pham kept beating the reader over the head with. Most of the characters were overly shallow and one-note for a book that wants to delve into more complex and cerebral struggles and conflict, and the various dynamics and relationships (especially that between Corin and Elly) became very tedious to read about due to the lack of any real complexity or nuance (despite how much the book repeatedly insisted that there was said complexity and nuance).

Corin is the worse of the two MCs, so I’ll start with her. The general sense of interiority is done in a way where the book is effectively explaining itself to the reader 24/7. Even with all that, I feel like I barely understood why she was doing something at any given point in time. It always felt like she was just doing what the particular scene needed her to do, instead of me having any real sense of the thought process and motivations behind her actions. This was exemplified by how she would suddenly switch from lashing out to being all teary-eyed and lovey-dovey with Elly. It felt like she alternated rapidly between the two modes without any real logical explanation as to what and why was making her do so and/or feel those contrasting emotions so strongly, even though the text literally explained everything on the page. The way Corin’s emotions were written just wasn’t convincing enough to line up with how the text explained what she was feeling. Most of the time, I either didn’t understand why she was doing something, or I felt as if her emotional state and internal reasoning were simply flipping to whatever was most convenient to move the plot forward.

Her character development is also entirely incoherent. This is in large part due to the utterly incomprehensible middle section of the book, where it felt as if we were being taken on the world’s most extreme and terrifying roller-coaster ride and also somehow teleporting in between rides at the same time. One moment we’re plummeting down a huge roller-coaster hill, the next we’re being flung about in spinning tea cups, and the next we’re on a fucking Ferris wheel moseying along at 0.1 mph. Corin’s motivations for doing anything become muddled and unclear after a certain point, and the text also presents us with some big reveals that feel unsupported, coming out of absolutely nowhere. All of this makes it very hard to understand how and why Corin changes over the course of the book, and although the shape of her character had kind of calcified by the end of the book, none of it felt earned in any sense because I was just so confused by what was happening in the middle of the book—you know, the actual meat of the story, where the character undergoes the trials and tribulations that are supposed to lead to their growth.

Amelia is written passably well, if a bit simplistically (though I can see it working well for the younger target audience), for about 75% of the book. The “before” timeline actually worked well for her character arc; I thought it was decently compelling, especially for the YA audience this book is being marketed toward. Like, I had a good understanding of her fears, her desires, and what was holding her back from what she truly needed (unlike with Corin, lmfao). I could understand why she did certain things (again, unlike with Corin). But as the romance plotline set in, I became increasingly unconvinced with Amelia’s character arc, probably because all of her development happened with the romance in the last 25% of the book. All of her change, learning, and growth depends on the reader being sufficiently convinced by the romantic relationship. And, well, I was not.

Speaking of: the romance is barely even there, despite how important it ends up being to the character growth. Very much insta-love and telling-not-showing. The text spends very little time proving that the two romantic leads fulfill the true needs of the each other, instead just shoehorning in all the relationship development through summarized passages. Considering that the characters’ relationship with each other is pivotal to each of their individual development arcs, this was not satisfying to read in the slightest.

I will give Pham some credit for the character of Malicine. It was a decently convincing and sympathetic take on a fairytale villain, and I actually found myself enjoying their POV chapters. They have a compelling backstory, a clear emotional wound that informs their actions in a logical way, and wants and desires that are very relatable and understandable. I’m not sure what accounts for the stark difference in the writing for Corin vs Malicine, other the fact that since Malicine was allowed to exist as more than a mouthpiece for one aspect of depression, they therefore felt more alive and three-dimensional when they were on the page. Ironic, that.

Plot

Actual pic of me trying to understand what the fuck was going on for 70% of the book:

Fuck my life, you guys. I’m going to file for illiteracy in the English language. This shit actually made zero fucking sense.

The dual timelines are handled moderately well, I can give it that. Sometimes the switching between one timeline vs the other felt a bit jarring or out of place, interrupting the flow of the story, but compared to everything else I thought the timelines were actually okay, for the most part. Or maybe everything else was just so bad that the timeline switching looked insanely good by comparison? Anyway…

In more standard commercial, character-driven YA books, we usually see a plot structure that braids the characters’ internal development with the progression of a larger external plot. Both arcs are meant to inform and drive the other. There’s a reason why a character’s final victory over some external force is usually intertwined with reaching the culmination of their internal arc, finishing the learning and growth that the story set out to give them from page one.

This book did not execute that effectively. I mean, I get the sense that Pham is trying to do something a bit different, and I can understand that maybe Pham was trying to go for less plot, and more introspection (to which I say: Corin’s introspection made zero sense either way, so that doesn’t help). One thing I noticed in the main timeline was that while the plot in this book does ostensibly follow the structure and format of a character-driven story, in that the protagonists learn some Fundamental Lesson which enables them to defeat the antagonists, for much of the plot the antagonistic forces simply aren’t…there? They feel like an afterthought, a forgotten-about entity who we know exist, but that knowledge does not have any sense of urgency or immediacy attached to it, effectively nullifying all sense of tension and stakes. Then, when the plot decides it wants to focus on them again, they come back with very little warning or build-up, making it difficult to follow and recall their motivations for working against the protagonists—since I as a reader have mostly forgotten about that stuff and had stopped ascribing much importance to the antagonists altogether.

So instead of much external plot happening around the protagonists for most of the book, there’s a heavy focus on the internal arc through the dream land stuff. Okay, great. I’m not a reader who needs a tightly-paced plot to enjoy a book; I can roll with that. But this was all handled exceedingly poorly. In the modern/present timeline, the characters’ actual goals and motivations were extremely unclear from about the 30% mark through to the 90% mark. Much of the middle portion of the book was spent trudging through Corin’s inexplicable whims and outbursts, without any clear understanding of where any of that was actually coming from, and it’s clear that this is meant to be her “character development”—but it’s not really impactful development if we don’t even understand why she thinks something and how she is changing. The text would say she was doing something because XYZ, or she felt ABC, but there was not really any evidence to back it up in the story itself (again with the telling rather than showing). And none of that really felt relevant to what happened at the end either way. They spent some time overcoming certain challenges, only to meet unrelated challenges at the end. Like, why did we even do all of that?

As I said above, the antagonists are generally understood to drive the plot forward in a book, but I didn’t understand what the antagonists here were doing, or why. I didn’t understand what the protagonists wanted after a certain point, either. I spent a lot of my time reading this book being utterly confused about where the story was going, why it was headed in that direction, and why the characters were doing what they were doing. It could be a problem with my reading comprehension, but I think that especially with the book being YA, being a bit more consistent about what the characters were actually trying to do for most of the plot would have been so helpful in trying to comprehend the story on a basic level. There is no thematic takeaway or impact on the part of the reader if they don’t even understand the logical chain of cause and effect in a story, which was exactly what happened here.

The past timeline wasn’t bad. At least there was a logical throughline there, and I actually understood the characters’ motivations and could follow what was happening and why. This was not true of the scenes in the modern timeline that took place in the dream world.

The twists and reveals in the past timeline were also not bad. There was one reveal that I thought was actually kind of clever, so props to Pham for that. However, this was not the case of the reveals and twists in the modern timeline. Again, it was so difficult to follow the logic of anything that happened in the modern timeline. One of the major twists was objectively completely unsupported by anything in the text that came before it, and what should have been a major reveal during the climax of the book just felt really fucking stupid. The magnitude of the build-up and the raising of stakes and tension is completely overblown for how little the pay-off actually matters.

Finally, the small plotline that kicks off at the 90% mark as the book headed toward the resolution did not make very much sense, either. I didn’t understand how or why anything was happening. They solved their problems and completed their character growth, but I couldn’t tell you how, so don’t ask lmao.

Worldbuilding and Setting

To get it out of the way: the fundamental logic of the dream world setting was, in the grand scheme things, fine. It didn’t make sense in the little plot thing that kicks off near the end, but by that point I was too exhausted and numb to care, so whatever. I thought the underlying rationale of the dream world was used reasonably well to provide a sense of stakes and narrative tension for the most part. I just did not enjoy those scenes very much because of the unwieldy writing style. If Pham had written the dream world in a competent manner, it would have been a very striking, memorable, and beautiful aspect of the work.

Now, okay. I’ve complained about how weirdly difficult it was to visualize anything in the setting already, but I also want to call out how vague and poorly developed much of the setting and world outside of the dream land stuff felt. This was not as egregiously unenjoyable and unsatisfying as the prose and the main characters, both of which are so completely and utterly flawed that I don’t even understand how the original manuscript made it through the querying process, but the story definitely would have been elevated if Pham had shown more care in laying out some of the basic foundational elements of the world. We are given the barest brushstrokes of a world and expected to just use our imagination to fill in the gaps of the setting’s premise. There is a war, but we do not understand why the war is happening exactly; we are not given a clear indication of the relationship between Gyldan and the other relevant countries of the world; some of the logical components of the setting and plot do not really hold up under closer scrutiny.

The biggest thing that annoyed me was the inclusion of a plastic toy in the “past” medieval fairytale-esque timeline. This is actually irrelevant in the grand scheme of the plot, but it was something that made me angry and took me out of the story. The thing that pisses me off the most is the fact that the material of the toy would have been completely irrelevant, something readers just glossed over, if Pham had taken maybe 0.5 seconds to think more deeply about the setting and world being presented to the reader. When the inclusion of the plastic is so immensely illogical relative to the expectations held by readers when they are given a medieval fairytale setting, and it would not affect the plot to change it to literally anything else that makes sense, it feels more like a lack of care and attention on the part of the author than anything, and therefore that becomes something that feels like an insult to the reader’s intelligence. I’m annoyed with the fact that we’re just supposed to accept the presence of plastic and go with it because the author said so. Like, no. I don’t accept it. It would take 2 seconds to fix it, so why isn’t it fixed??? Why is this what we are being given???

At the end of the day though, all of the flaws in the setting are, once again, overshadowed by how poorly executed the other parts of the book were, so I’ll leave off on explaining and nitpicking it here. Ultimately none of it is very important or relevant to the story itself, and lord knows this review is long enough already.

Conclusion

This was an ambitious and imaginative book that presented some very compelling ideas in the emotional heart of the story. However, between the unwieldy prose, illogical characters, and confusing plot, I found myself completely confused and frustrated with the book after finishing it, even when I took the YA audience into account. The allegorical aspects of the book were interesting and impressive in scope, but ultimately became muddled and disjointed due to the deeply flawed execution of the actual story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

🫛🐝 Exclusive Section

In the acknowledgements of the book, Pham lists off people she wants to thank, and the last section reads as follows:

“Last but not least, everyone who has followed my journey on YouTube and social media. Whether you’re an avid commenter or silent lurker, a long-time viewer or a newbie, your support gave me a platform that increased my chances of publishing this book and made the publisher more invested in it…I hope I meet more of you IRL so we can escalate this parasocial relationship even further. And regardless, we’ll always have faerie dick jokes on the internet.”

I’m not putting this on NetGalley (in fact, I might move this to the comments here, idk if this warrants a spot in the review itself), but I’d love to hear what other people think of this. I personally did not love this. Reading it left a bad taste in my mouth.

First of all, Pham is directly implying that her YouTube platform gave her a better chance of getting the book published. She really didn’t have to mention the part about publishers being invested if she just wanted to thank her followers for being there through the process, so I can only assume that the inclusion of that bit was intentional.

Second, the last sentence is said jokingly/lightheartedly (i assume) but it’s also what I can only presume to be a direct reference to Pham’s YouTube critiques of SJM and books similar to the ACOTAR series. I do not love this kind of open snark in the literal acknowledgments of a published book. Pham clearly wants to be a professional author…so I’d love to see a more professional sense of decorum, you know? But maybe I’m overreacting. (Also: Cindy, I promise, I enjoyed your book less than the 25% of ACOTAR that I have actually read. At least SJM’s unhinged metaphors made me laugh, instead of making me feel like I didn’t even understand the English language. 🙃)

Pham does also thank the standard editors, agents, friends, etc before all of this, so again, maybe I’m just reading too much into it and am over-reacting/need to take a chill pill.

Anyway, I’m really curious about other peoples’ opinions of this bit if you read this entire behemoth of a review lmao. Thank you from the bottom of my heart if you actually read this whole thing 🙂‍↕️

Rating: 1.25 of 5 / Advanced Reader Copy received from NetGalley ⭐️

DNF @ 45%

Book summary

lowkey i couldn’t even tell you. they have to get a treasure from somewhere but i truly have no grasp of why this was a plot point :/

Criticism

it seems like this book wanted to subvert the typical tropes, as this is a fairytale retelling, and while i 1) am neutral to fairy tales 2) don’t care about retellings and 3) am no longer in the YA demographic, i know i’m 100% not the audience for this book but i can still appreciate a good book if it’s good

that being said, pham relied too heavily on these tropes existing in this fantasy world and the characters being self-aware that they fit these exact tropes—i don’t know if pham intended to break the fourth wall on this or if it just came to be a theme within the chapters

Amelia: Even in fairy tales, princesses merely existed in stories that others wanted to tell.

Corin: […] this is how fairy tales were supposed to end.

i’m sure if i made it to the end, the tropes would be somewhat subverted but how they get there is confusing in tone

also the way i cannot get a grip on any solid description—there’s no real direction, no physical location to hold on to. i get that the fluidity of movement in the dream realm is supposed to represent this fairytale fantasy but i couldn’t get my foothold to sink deep enough to understandably consume what in the world was even happening and why the characters were expressing these emotions. i would say the book lacked spatial awareness but i can’t even tell if that’s what i mean in regards to how nondescript the “world building” is with a few purple proses to decorate the edges so it doesn’t seem like anything is lacking.

even while i describe certain parts as nondescript, i still feel like every other second, the writing brought something up to make sure i knew what Big Feelings were happening in the moment, even if we don’t have to reach that conclusion yet if that makes sense? it was like i’m driving down a long stretch of road and every 2 miles there’s a sign that says “gas station to your left” except there’s no left? the road is straight and the sign keeps appearing on the road in the next 2 miles “gas station to your left” BABY THERE IS NO LEFT?? STOP THREATENING ME !!

Underdevelopment

aside from the world building being all over the place and not concrete enough, the characters were not that interesting to me from the beginning. they are immediately depressed and unshakeable when we meet them so it seemed to drag during their separate chapters before they met up with each other

the titular character and her love interest have so little chemistry, if one of them became a pet, neither of them would care to adopt 😭 like it’s sad brah lmfao i came for the sapphic romance but all i got was a depression mug

and i love a good story that involves very broken, imperfect, and suffering characters, but i don’t feel like there was an opportunity to really dive into their mental health. and from what i’ve read from spoiler reviews, it seems it doesn’t really have good progress on that front in the end anyway…

malicine had a few good moments with their pov chapters and then they seemed to disappear into the background, forgotten and unrelated to the plot until called upon by either main characters. they could’ve been the cuntiest if they had an ounce of description given to them, but even their appearance in the story didn’t move me

especially corin’s sister elly who felt very one-dimensional—it seemed she was just there to give corin a reason to feel any type of emotion, carefree and simple-minded because of course her big sister has to handle all of the emotional responsibility of the world’s cruelty right

Ending Thoughts

all in all, i really wanted to like this book. i enjoy some of pham’s content though i am not a regular patron of it on social media or youtube, but i was excited for her to be telling a story of her own bc i think she’s funny and cool

i will say i would still tune in for pham’s second or third book. i think there is potential there, and if she can fine tune her skills then she could tell a great story, hopefully one that doesn’t rely on an existing story to carry the weight of it

the one thing i regret was not reading this sooner bc now i have no choice but to DNF during AAPI month or pride month and i am deeply sorry for that i have failed both my communities 😔