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pensnfeathers 's review for:
The V Girl: A Coming of Age Story
by Mya Robarts
This is a hard one to rate, partly because it was not what I expected. See, I saw someone raving about this book on Tiktok, and I thought it was right up my alley. I do love a cheesy dystopian YA romance.
It turns out this is a cheesy dystopian romance, but it's not YA. Not really. It reads as though a huge fan of Divergent or The Hunger Games took those books, made the plot revolve around sex, and added a bunch of explicit sex scenes. It still reads like YA, but it's absolutely porn.
Which is fine! I'm a grown ass adult. I can read and enjoy some porn. And at first I was enjoying it. The first half of the book was pretty fun. Sure, the worldbuilding was vague and didn't make much sense, and some of the characters are very one dimensional, but those are always problems in dytopian YA. The main character was interesting enough. Her love interest was... goofy. There was conflict. Stakes. And yes, some decent erotica. It was pretty good.
The second half fell off hard. I don't know if the author's writing process changed or if I just started to notice, but a lot of the dialogue got bad. The main love interest and the MC's siblings were particularly egregious in this. It's like they forgot how to talk like human people. Then there were a couple of plot choices that were both out of character and did nothing for the story. One scene involving a tertiary character at the end of the story was particularly bad. Totally out of character. No warning. Not necessary to the plot. One of those scenes where I can confidently say "people who have read the book will know exactly which scene I'm talking about."
I'm also not the biggest fan on this book's take on kink in general and CNC in particular. BDSM is healthy and normal sexual practice. Much of the second half of this book presents it as something to be feared, and even morally opposed to.
These are a very generous 3 stars. Call it a 4 for the first half, a 1.5 for the second, and see if I come back later after some more thought and change my review to a 2.
It turns out this is a cheesy dystopian romance, but it's not YA. Not really. It reads as though a huge fan of Divergent or The Hunger Games took those books, made the plot revolve around sex, and added a bunch of explicit sex scenes. It still reads like YA, but it's absolutely porn.
Which is fine! I'm a grown ass adult. I can read and enjoy some porn. And at first I was enjoying it. The first half of the book was pretty fun. Sure, the worldbuilding was vague and didn't make much sense, and some of the characters are very one dimensional, but those are always problems in dytopian YA. The main character was interesting enough. Her love interest was... goofy. There was conflict. Stakes. And yes, some decent erotica. It was pretty good.
The second half fell off hard. I don't know if the author's writing process changed or if I just started to notice, but a lot of the dialogue got bad. The main love interest and the MC's siblings were particularly egregious in this. It's like they forgot how to talk like human people. Then there were a couple of plot choices that were both out of character and did nothing for the story. One scene involving a tertiary character at the end of the story was particularly bad. Totally out of character. No warning. Not necessary to the plot. One of those scenes where I can confidently say "people who have read the book will know exactly which scene I'm talking about."
I'm also not the biggest fan on this book's take on kink in general and CNC in particular. BDSM is healthy and normal sexual practice. Much of the second half of this book presents it as something to be feared, and even morally opposed to.
These are a very generous 3 stars. Call it a 4 for the first half, a 1.5 for the second, and see if I come back later after some more thought and change my review to a 2.