DNF @ 70% / page 218 🫠


CHARACTERS:

I didn’t like Tilly at all. She was really unself-aware, entitled and, honestly? A goddamn menace. I get that she has ADHD, which definitely explains some of her actions, but I’m sorry; ADHD doesn’t make a person rude and dumb. That’s on Tilly.

She would do absurd things and then be shocked they didn’t go her way. Like, she assumed she had the window seat in the plane because she refused to even LOOK at her ticket, and then was left agape when she found out that was someone else’s seat and they didn’t want to switch with her. 😑 She decided to throw rocks at a window and then was shocked the glass broke??!!!?! 🤨 She bought something without doing the currency conversion (she decided to just GUESS the price despite not knowing this currency at all, instead of… idk…. checking on her phone???) and then was FLABBERGASTED that the thing she bought was expensive… 🤦🏻 For fuck’s sake….

Sometimes Tilly also gave me Mary Sue vibes, tbh. Like, right at the start of the book Tilly decided to run away from the airplane/airport, hitting and shoving a bunch of people out of her way, yet no one (not even airport security) stops her. She’s ~sooooo gorgeous~ that MULTIPLE strangers feel the need to TELL it to her the 1st time they see her, completely unprompted…. Okay.

Perhaps one of the reasons why I didn’t like her was also because most of the terrible humour in this book came from her chapters, which made her POV even more difficult to stomach. Also, can I be petty and say that the name Tilly Twomley bothers me, for some reason? 😗✌🏻


I liked Oliver much more. It was interesting to see the world through the eyes of an autistic character, and see his struggles with relating to people and understanding social cues. Also, one of his mums is portuguese???? And he speaks (at least some) portuguese?!?! (This is only mentioned 1 time, but I’ll take what I can get). 🇵🇹🇵🇹🇵🇹


I didn’t care about the SCs at all. The moment Tilly sees her sister Mona interacting with her business partner she immediately assumes she likes said partner (because I guess in Tilly’s head one MUST be attracted to their coworker, if they’re hot enough……). But then Mona and the coworker actually start dating, so I guess she was right, despite having no reasons to believe they’d like each other, other than “The coworker is hot”. There was no development there, and we barely knew these characters, though, so idk how I’m supposed to care lol. 😐

The only thing I have to say about them is regarding their business: you’re telling me that they won a highly competitive business competition and received money to start their company, and are negotiating with popular stores (among both turists and locals) in places like Paris, and yet their brand only had like 100 instagram followers? The math wasn’t mathing. 🤔 Also, the fact that they hired Oliver to work for them and they make him share hotel rooms with his boss’s little sister on a fucking work trip is soooo unprofessional!!!!!! Like, that’s actually insane! I hope their business fails, because what the actual fuck????????????

Oliver’s sister and her friends were completely irrelevant. I don’t know anything about them. They just fangirled with Tilly for 1 conversation (which WE, the readers, barely saw), and they apparently became close enough to the point where they were calling Tilly to tell her about a job opportunity they thought she’d be great for because they’d been reading all of her blog posts? Was that enough for them to be that close? When did that develop??? That friendship literally wasn’t on page… Aff……..



ROMANCE:

The romance was shit, y’all. 🤠🤠🤠 The moment they see each other they’re INSTANTLY attracted to each other (Tilly mentioned Oliver’s chin/jaw like 20 times when she 1st saw him, and it was driving me nuts). And like……. FINE. Okay. I thought: “Perhaps they’re just PHYSICALLY attracted to each other! You can find other people hot! Doesn’t mean this will be insta-love, right?!”

…… RIGHT??? …………… Well, yeah. Call me booboo the fool for even having hope this wouldn’t be insta-love. It was 100% insta-love. 🤡🤡🤡 The 2nd time they meet they’re already trying to impress each other. The 3rd time she’s (and I quote) “YEARNING” for him. They’ve known each other for a total of 3 days and Oliver cannot sleep because he keeps thinking about Tilly. They were going to kiss after knowing each other for 4 days (and, mind you: in that time they’d had *ONE* decent conversation! Every other time they even tried to interact it had been a total disaster!!!).

The fact that they go from complete strangers who only have disastrous interactions to *liking each other* in only 4 DAYS is, honestly, completely absurd. Their “connection” was entirely forced. I would barely even consider them acquaintances, let alone friends , let alone LOVERS . And, by the way: just because the characters acknowledge that it’s weird to be super enthralled and completely trust a person you barely even know doesn’t make it any less annoying to read. 😪 A poorly developed romance (especially in a ROMANCE book) sucks 100% of the time. Period.



WRITING:

This book was paaaainfully unfunny, which sucks, because there was a poor attempt at comedy every other page. First of all, we have the physical comedy:

• Tilly forgetting her bag at airport security and then having to sit there while the security takes 40 panties from said bag to make sure she wasn’t hiding anything nefarious? Unfunny. 🙄
• Tilly asking for like 20 ketchup packets and then spilling it onto a stranger? Aff… 🙄
• Tilly getting nauseous and having a stranger grab her like a rag doll and shoving her in the airplane bathroom? Okay…… 🙄
• Tilly sprinting out of the airplane/airport and knocking a bunch of people over? For fuck’s sake, stop it. 🙄 also wouldn’t airport security stop you???? running away like that is VERY suspicious…. but whatever
• Tilly “spraying out [her] drink like an overzealous bathing elephant, showering [her]self (and Mona’s white throw rug) in hot brown liquid.”? Not even a smile. 🙄
• Tilly getting her arm stuck under a dresser and the LI using shampoo to lubricate her arm out of there? Not even a THOUGHT of a smile. 🙄

The other (non-physical) attempts at humour were also really bad. The writing in this book is giving 2012-tumblr-text-post, and I mean that in a completely derogatory way. The following terms are all used in the *narration* of this book (not even when characters speak or type; the actual narration):

• “Le sigh.”
• “I am requesting that you gag me.”
• “I will go down with this ship”
• “*Parisian aesthetic*” (yes, with the asterisks)

It got soooo 2012-tumblr that I jokingly predicted we’d probably see a ~pterodactyl screech~ at some point. And guess what…….? THERE WAS AN UNIRONIC USE OF THE TERM “PTERODACTYL SCREECH”!!!!!!!!! 😭😭😭😭 “A noise somewhere between a mating whale and a pterodactyl screech bursts out of my throat” BE FUCKING FOR REAL RIGHT NOW!

Yeah…. This book is the definition of ~there was an attempt~ when it comes to the humour. 🙃


Another really bad thing about the writing is the amount of telling instead of showing . They’re on a trip around Europe visiting sooo many different, incredible places, and yet we barely see any of them. 😕 They’re just ~suddenly~ in a new city. On a different chapter we learn they already visited another country. In *1 singular paragraph* the author tells us they already went to another 3 famous cities. They were just zooming through these places, which is annoying because 1) we’re not seeing any of it; and 2) because it’s a HUGE waste to not use these iconic and unique locations in your story. This book could literally take place in any random US city. They didn’t even need the traveling part, since all we’re seeing is them in hotels, restaurants, or going for a walk. 😐😐😐

As I already mentioned, the romance and friendships were also barely developed. The author just said they liked each other (after knowing each other for literally 3 days), and you were supposed to believe it, despite seeing no reason for their connection to even exist. That’s a 2 for 1: telling instead of showing + terrible pacing/development. Yey! 🙃

Overall, the writing was kinda shit. Matched the rest of the book!