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A review by paragraphsandpages
The Loophole by Naz Kutub
1.0
Honestly, I’m at the point where the only thing I need to hear about a book to be interested is that it’s queer. Bonus points if it’s diverse in other ways, from disability rep to a BIPOC author. So I was already sold on this book before I even found out it was about mythology, another one of my favorite things. Of course, I still tempered hopes, since I’ve been burned by hyping a book up too much before, but I didn’t think there was any way this book could let me down that much. Unfortunately, I was very wrong.
This book felt messy and shallow, in so many ways. There are a lot of hard topics being touched on here, more than could ever reasonably fit in 336 pages. However, it seems like the book doesn’t want to actually discuss or think on these topics, and it literally just felt like they were added for shock value. Almost everything seemed to bounce off the MC, with very little time spent actually growing from or reflecting on anything. Every once in a while, a small reference would be made to some past traumatic event, but never in a way that actually mattered. It just added up and gave the whole book this ridiculous air, even though these are real issues that affect real people. This wasn’t helped by the main side character, Reggie, also being entirely impossible to take seriously. She was also clearly going through something, but we kinda sorta ignored that? Which I guess you could just say about everything when it comes to the ending. Nothing feels actually resolved, or at least resolved well, and it almost kind of felt like the journey was a bit pointless in the end? We just never saw the plot actually impact the MC all that much, so it just felt like we were going in circles.
Also, for a book that hinges entirely on love as the MC’s driving motivation, I didn’t find the romance all that convincing. The flashbacks only revealed how poorly Farouk and Sayyed seemed to treat each other, and there were so many moments where either Farouk felt super manipulative or Sayyed was just ignorant to the point of being extremely insulting. This just meant that there was nothing really keeping me invested in Sayyed’s journey, because I just couldn’t understand why he would go through all this based on the flashbacks alone.
Overall, I feel like the idea of this book was quite strong, but just wasn’t executed well. It needed to focus a lot more on the relationships between characters, and just the characters in general. It’s rare that a book suffers from way too much plot, but that was, in the end, the core issue here. There was just too much constantly happening for any of it to actually mean anything, and the characters never had a break to really grow or learn from anything before they were whisked away to the next traumatic event. It just did not work for me at all, even though I wish it had.
This book felt messy and shallow, in so many ways. There are a lot of hard topics being touched on here, more than could ever reasonably fit in 336 pages. However, it seems like the book doesn’t want to actually discuss or think on these topics, and it literally just felt like they were added for shock value. Almost everything seemed to bounce off the MC, with very little time spent actually growing from or reflecting on anything. Every once in a while, a small reference would be made to some past traumatic event, but never in a way that actually mattered. It just added up and gave the whole book this ridiculous air, even though these are real issues that affect real people. This wasn’t helped by the main side character, Reggie, also being entirely impossible to take seriously. She was also clearly going through something, but we kinda sorta ignored that? Which I guess you could just say about everything when it comes to the ending. Nothing feels actually resolved, or at least resolved well, and it almost kind of felt like the journey was a bit pointless in the end? We just never saw the plot actually impact the MC all that much, so it just felt like we were going in circles.
Also, for a book that hinges entirely on love as the MC’s driving motivation, I didn’t find the romance all that convincing. The flashbacks only revealed how poorly Farouk and Sayyed seemed to treat each other, and there were so many moments where either Farouk felt super manipulative or Sayyed was just ignorant to the point of being extremely insulting. This just meant that there was nothing really keeping me invested in Sayyed’s journey, because I just couldn’t understand why he would go through all this based on the flashbacks alone.
Overall, I feel like the idea of this book was quite strong, but just wasn’t executed well. It needed to focus a lot more on the relationships between characters, and just the characters in general. It’s rare that a book suffers from way too much plot, but that was, in the end, the core issue here. There was just too much constantly happening for any of it to actually mean anything, and the characters never had a break to really grow or learn from anything before they were whisked away to the next traumatic event. It just did not work for me at all, even though I wish it had.