Review: Don't Want You Like a Best Friend

 


There was so much hype around this book and it just…did not meet my expectations at all. I don’t have a ton to say specifically, but there were a couple reasons it annoyed me. First, there really wasn’t anything to make it unique. It felt as formulaic as a queer period romance can get – two upper-class white leads fall in love, they scheme to find a way to be together, they have sex, they break up at the end of the second act, they get back together. Whatever. There was just nothing to make it unique, nothing that gave it any grab or grit.

The second issue is that Beth and Gwen were completely indistinguishable from one another. Aside from which parent they spent time with, there was really nothing about them that made it possible to keep track of who was narrating at a given point. Pro tip: if you can’t write distinctive characters, don’t have multiple POVs. They’re like the characters in a love triangle where the only difference is that one has brown hair (gasp).

On another note, one thing that could have been a major distinguishing factor between Gwen and Beth was Gwen’s (frankly alarming) tendency towards alcoholism. She spends a good chunk of the end of the book doing little but drinking. But it basically goes unaddressed, and pretty much disappears as soon as she gets back together with Beth, which is…not a great message to send about substance abuse.

The one thing that I did enjoy about the book was as scene towards the end where Beth’s mother (finally) actually acts like she wants to help Beth and rants at some gross men. That was great. The only scene that I genuinely enjoyed reading. Everything else was just…meh.



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