Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic by Breanne Randall

16 reviews

bzliz's review against another edition

emotional hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Yikes. I really wish I’d read the reviews before I was substantially into this book. I finished it out of spite but that sure is time of my life that I’ll never get back. Reading the audiobook made it worse- I did not enjoy the narrator’s performance at all and each chapter ends with a recipe. I’d never considered how it would feel having a recipe dictated into my eardrums but now I know it feels vaguely sinister for some reason.

Edit: I checked out the author’s website after writing this review and she includes Elon Musk in a list of things she loves which really tempts me to drop the rating lower than 1 star. It just feels important for me to include that prior to my regular yapping about why- in my opinion- this book was garbage.

I have several issues with this book. The most grievous is how carelessly the author handled some serious subjects including suicide, rape & murder. The latter two are discussed over just a few pages in which the now-dying of cancer grandmother of our main character (who is nearly 30 years old) decides to impart vital information about her past, including that her mother didn’t abandon them of her own accord but rather because it was part of her curse after her toxic relationship resulted in a rape and forced pregnancy after which the grandmother killed the man. We just breeze right past all that. As for the suicide- I’d normally put this under a spoiler warning but I think it’s important to be clear in this instance- Sadie virtually out of nowhere decides that she needs to die to save her brother’s life and makes a suicide attempt on page. Her brother discovers her and resuscitates her but we also breeze right past this and only 3 members of the extensive cast ever know this happened. This simply didn’t need to happen. If she had thought about it for just five more minutes, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Next- the romance is stupid. Jake is boring as hell and keeps to himself for way too long that he’s engaged to another woman, who happens to be pregnant. It made me feel so icky when he revealed that information because he had several chances and chose to say nothing. I also hated that the fiancee turned out to have faked her pregnancy to keep Jake around. What a stupid thing to do. Of course that was never going to work. And if your man seems like he’s in love with someone else, you should probably move on because it’s not going to end well. Sadie had her heart broken by him at 18 years old and is equally obsessed when he comes back to town 10 years later. I couldn’t figure out why they still liked each other after a decade apart and I believe it’s merely nostalgia for youth because they have no chemistry.

Third, the author takes normal life occurrences and tries to make it specific to Sadie’s family. They have so many rules about life and family mottos that crop up every few pages. One example is that every Revelare leaves but they always come back. Like it’s abnormal for people to move away from home. I got sick of hearing about that quickly. Each of them also gets a curse to go with their magic. Sadie’s curse is to suffer 4 heartbreaks, which is just a fact of life. The heartbreaks she suffers are that her high school boyfriend tells her he loves her, then leaves her (it sucks but it’s normal), her brother moves away for a year (he could’ve given her a heads up but also normal), and her grandmother Gigi dies (super normal, especially since Sadie is almost 30 years old). So really she has no curse and is whiny about having to live life and be magical. Also, one of Sadie’s aunts actively calls Gigi “mommy” which is just awful coming out of a middle aged woman’s mouth.

I could nitpick forever about the details but my last major issue was the failure to advertise the religious aspects of this book. Christianity is important to all these characters. There are comparisons to biblical stories discussed by them. It’s so incongruous to the witchy vibes and I never would have picked this up had that been indicated in any way. I just can’t make sense of having actual real magic powers and participating in an organized religion that historically doesn’t vibe with magic.

TLDR: this book is a waste of time tragedy porn taking cheap emotional shots to manipulate readers to think It’s better than it is.

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fancyjess_party's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

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heatherjchin's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.5

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lbcavender's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

The book was not what I expected. I feel like the blurb made the book seem as if it would be more of a small-town fantasy romance novel rather than one with a literal life-or-death situation.

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lizthereader92's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

Trigger warning for sure. I don’t know if this was maybe just my print run but the editing wasn’t great. There were a lot of typos and even the wrong character listed as speaking in a scene. This just wasn’t what I pictured for a cozy read. I wanted to love this book but in the end I couldn’t.

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ehoustonmyatt's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

This had potential to be so fun, even with darker themes. It, instead, focused on things that weren’t important and whizzed past the reveals that were supposed to be big. The Bethany of it all was very stereotypical and predictable, the love interest sucked, and it dropped some big dark themes too casually and not very thoughtfully. Also, the diversity included seemed like a performative afterthought.

It’s sold as a “cozy” read that feels like Gilmore Girls meets Practical Magic but it didn’t deliver any of that.

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amyteurhour's review against another edition

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1.0

Content warning: cancer, abandonment, rape, infidelity, toxic relationship, murder

This was annoying. The mystery/curse was intriguing, but not intriguing enough that I was willing to get through the whole book. The overuse of "pissant" and "shit ass" was also annoying and not an adorable quirk (like what I think the author was trying to go for). This is compared to Practical Magic, and though I've only read a little of PM, I would agree, in that the sexual assault is just super casually mentioned and then buried in boring nonsense. To be honest, I got further than I expected because I've been in between audiobooks and didn't have any I wanted to start on my shelf, so I just kept defaulting to this when I was doing chores around the house.

I also didn't love the audiobook, finding the narration to be either very flat and boring, or super grating depending on the character. I ended up skipping the recipes at the end of each chapter because I was tired of the voice and just wanted to be done with the book. But this book is so long for seemingly no reason.

Stopped at ch 11 (7:37:15).

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