DNF 63%

this started out sooo good. everything from the pov of Holly Sykes was so engaging and interesting and mysterious and made me so excited to read more. but then we started pov hopping through the most boring men characters i could possibly imagine. just rambling on and on about shit that did not matter to the plot or anything else. to the point that i honestly lost all interest in the plot.

david mitchell needs to get an editor who's not afraid to make him cut like half the pagecount on this. why are we letting men ramble on for this long for no reason??

i love my two idiot gay sons

i would like to start off with a disclaimer that i don't think this book is objectively bad–it was just bad for me personally. Or not even bad, just very mid.

baseball is such a boring sport to me but i was hopeful that if it was gay and trans, it would be less boring. i was wrong. baseball became somehow even more boring to me after this book.

i also did not give a single fuck about Gene, the main character. he was just as boring as baseball. the romance also didn't hook me. it just felt incredibly predictable and once again, boring. and once again, this story and characters weren't badly written or anything. but it felt like a spark was missing.

i know i'm in the minority here and i'm glad this kind of book exists and that people are loving it, but i did not like this. the prose also irked me at many points.

overall, not for me but i'm glad it's out there for others.

this was really cute and fun for what it was! i enjoyed the incorporation of the sports into the romance (which is so often done wrong).

maybe a little too younger gen z (or maybe even gen alpha??? where does gen z end?) for my taste but then again, that's who the main audience for this book is.

my main issue is that it got too convoluted at times and the characters kept going back and forth with what they wanted, which started to get frustrating at some point. also hated the way troy's character was constructed.

other than that, i actually really enjoyed how vivid all the characters were and how natural their friendship was written.

overall, very cute gay read for the kids these days.