Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

this could've been nice you know. the writing was beautifully lyrical and i liked the themes of death and grief, and the talk about art and food was wonderfully comfortable.
but the rest... not so much.

this felt like a reality show in book form. like milf manor, but make it dilf manor and also erase all the fun because that shit wants you to take it seriously.

i hated all the characters. and i understand the situation in this book is messy and there's no real right or wrong, but the characters handled all of it so poorly, and how they acted just made me livid.

like feyi for example. so let me preface this by saying, feyi and her best friend do absolutely NOT pass the bechdel test. all they talk about is men (or love interests in general), and about fucking and their relationship problems. i swear, they do not talk about anything else, and it made it sort of hard to believe they're best friends.

but anyways, feyi - super unlikable, and there's no real depth to her character. her whole personality orbits around her dead husband and the art she creates ABOUT said dead husband and fucking her lover's dad. there was absolutely nothing else to her character, nothing to grasp, nothing to relate to or sympathise with.

what especially pissed me off was that she acted like she was so much better than nasir after he found out about them and lashed out at her. sure, he's an asshole for that, but the way she thought she had the high-ground was so annoying to me? because she's not at all better than him - she fucks her date's DAD man.
i sympathised with none of the characters, because they were all just the same shade of shitty.
still i feel like the author did nasir dirty. his reaction was extremely out of character, which i mean i guess makes sense, because you never know how a person truly is, but it was so INSANELY out of character, it felt like the author wrote him to be a shitty person so the reader feels bad for feyi and alim, even though nasir was nothing but a sweetheart at the beginning.

oh, and feyi and alim - don't even get me started. they bonded over grief for their lost loves, which is a nice icebreaker, right, but their entire relationship is built on that one thing they have in common. they had no chemistry whatsoever, and not any more mutual interests except maybe food and art but those conversations were pretty shallow and/or only there to build sexual tension (literally i will never get the image of them licking foam of each other's hands out of my head).
their relationship and love felt ingenuine and if this was real life, i doubt it would last.

but okay, let's end this on like a brighter note. i enjoyed the general trope of falling in love after a tragedy like that.
i also really loved feyi's art pieces and how they were described. as an artist myself, those fascinated me a lot.
and also, i fully support the idea of "older" people pursuing relationships, because we were conditioned to believe that new and fresh love is only for the young, and that you should stop trying at a certain age.
alim chose his children over love the first time and i thought it was nice to watch him coming out of his shell, because in the greater scheme of things, he's still young, and has long years of life still in front of him, and he deserves love, even if his children don't like it.
but you know... maybe not with your son's girlfriend next time.

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bookbuyingwithkatie's review

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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wilybooklover's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

2.5

It’s hard to know how to rate this one because there were some things I loved and some things I didn’t.

Feyi and Alim felt like real, complex people. It’s hard to sell me on an age-gap romance (especially where one is old enough to be the other’s parent) but I think the author just about made it work. Loved the depiction of friendship between Feyi and Joy, and the vibrant island setting too. The writing was very pretty but I didn’t quite vibe with it; it felt like it was so overwrought that it got in the way of the narrative at times.

My main issues: not only did the romance feel a little rushed, but it also felt as though there was something missing. I’m not sure whether it was because the MCs don’t meet until the book is quite far in (27%), or because Alim’s character and emotional arc felt secondary to Feyi’s, or maybe a combination of both. They had like three conversations and suddenly they were madly in love? I just needed to see more interaction to buy it. It also felt like overcoming grief was the primary plot and the romance was the secondary plot. I wish there had been a little more focus on the romance and that Alim had more page-time. Maybe if the first third was condensed and the last third expanded, it would have worked for me better.

If you like complex, nuanced characters, messy emotions, questionable decisions, and romance-adjacent women’s fiction that leans literary then I think you’ll like this one.

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thecatconstellation's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This is a complicated, messy love story and a brilliant reflection on love after loss.

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samixox's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A story about grief and how life is not always clean. The different ways that grief bubbles up inside people, a beautiful story with beautiful writing.

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