Review: Looking for a Sign

 

So I’ll start off with the fact that there is a good chance I’m really not the target audience for this book. I really do not care about astrology even a tiny bit. I can tell you I’m a Saggitarius and that is literally it. And I have a suspicion this book is a lot more entertaining if the reader has any idea what the various stereotypes of all the different signs are, blah blah blah. I do not. So already not the best start. But I could absolutely set that aside if the rest of the book were amazing (see previous review about baseball). Unfortunately, this was not that book.

First of all, Gray really irritated me. There was a whole lot of ‘cis lesbian trying really hard to be a trans ally’ in a way that got on my nerves. I don’t remember every instance of this, but one example was a conversation in which Gray is talking to her best friend Cherry. Cherry asks her if she’s still identifying as a lesbian, and Gray says she’s open to dating anyone except cis men, but that she still identifies as a lesbian. Which, okay. Far be it from me to tell people how they have to identify, and if she wants to identify as a lesbian that’s perfectly fine. But it would have been really nice for there to have been some kind of acknowledgment that there might be some non-binary people and trans men who would like to not be lumped in with ‘people lesbians are attracted to’ – I know personally I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of dating someone who identifies as a lesbian because to me it would suggest that I’m basically a woman. Now, this is absolutely not the case for all people, and again – that is fine. But Gray literally goes on a date with a trans guy, and it feels important to me for that to be a conversation that is had.

Beyond that, there was just really nothing about her that I enjoyed reading about. She made quite a lot of terrible decisions and was generally very self-centered. It occurs to me this may have been more of a self-discovery book than I was really interested in? But honestly it was like everyone else in the book – her best friend, her dates, her love interest – existed for the sole purpose of helping her figure her life out. The love interest (who shall remain unnamed for the sake of avoiding spoilers) had effectively zero character growth or arc, which made the relationship a bit boring to read about. Big meh for me.