Having read this book I now understand how people felt in BtVs when they said “I’d rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff!” I’d rather have railroad spikes or hot pokers shoved into my eyes rather than have to read this book again. The author seems to have read the old saying “that if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit:, only I’m afraid he believes he’s brilliant. I know he writes as if he swallowed both a dictionary and a thesaurus in his youth and they are slowly coming out.
I suppose that Sam and Sadie are supposed to be likable characters (I think they’re supposed to be likable characters), but has the author ever actually met people before? Because of course they have some big misunderstanding that could be easily solved if Sadie could actually communicate, and Sam wasn’t so obsessed with holding onto how butthurt he is by life. And of course he becomes creepy Incel boy because of course he doesn’t want anything to do with Sadie, but hey! Why doesn’t she realize she belongs to him…I mean with him.
Marx is the only decent person in the entire book, and I spent every moment he was on the page praying he would get the hell away from them all. And he does, just not the way I had hoped he would. I suppose this is supposed to be a book about semi-extraordinary people living semi-extraordinary lives while still being just like you and me; unfortunately, all I kept thinking while I was reading the book was that it was lovely the author had a premonition of Belinda Chandra and Alan Budd long before Russell T. Davies had written them. And yes, I know that Sam is probably written to be on the Asperger’s spectrum and that explains his personality, but can we not just say that a crumb is a crumb? And the ending kind of peters out; which I guess with this kind of book isn’t that surprising; they do tend to end on a whimper, not a bang.
I spent the entire book hate-reading it; I only finished because my mother had read it first, and she wanted my opinion about it. I don’t begrudge her the time I wasted with it; I’ve forced several rather bad books on her over the years. I just realize that 9 times out of 10 when a book is billed as a “must read” and “on everyone’s lips”, that’s the time for me to head promptly in the other direction; I can be so far away from the main crowd that I’m considered a hermit.