A review by laurennoel
The Messy Lives of Book People by Phaedra Patrick

1.0

who the hell approves these books for publication. I tried to find something redeeming about this book but each character has a half a dimension to them, the prose sucks, the dialogue is written like a stilted conversation held between two people that learned english within two months out of a textbook from 1993, and what the fuck is this boring ass plot

will I keep coming back to add things that annoy me? yes. the main character is meant to be 42 but she has the mentality of a 16 year old, her husband is literally a caricature, and it’s incredibly unbelievable that this woman was meant to have raised two sons.

this is the second book I’ve read this week that has unnecessary flashbacks explaining things that could’ve been explained in a quick aside. not only that, the flashbacks are placed randomly in the story. there is no narrative flow. this reads like a first draft where the author herself is discovering the story as she writes it and hasn’t bothered to edit anything.