A review by books_ergo_sum
Muscles & Monsters by Ashley Bennett

2.0

That two stars feels harsh because, really, this little book was fiiine. The MCs were cute, I was rooting for them.

But what really took me out of it was the whiplash it was giving me. We’d go directly from a scene that was soo cutesy, awkward, flirting, blushing, emojis—to a scene that was full-on dirty talk schmexy times, then back again. With absolutely nothing to mediate the two extremes. 

The Hegelian in me was like, dude where’s my concrete universal? Where’s the actualization of a rational self-consciousness in another self-consciousness? That mediation *is* the love story, which… wasn’t present in the book? It was strange.

The two extremes were fun on their own but flip flopping between them was too weird for me.