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doradee 's review for:
The Perks of Loving a Wallflower
by Erica Ridley
A silly but sweet read. I'm seeing it get dinged a lot for historical accuracy in reviews, which is completely fair; this definitely feels like a Saturday morning cartoon version of the Regency. There is not close attention to placing us in a Regency setting or presenting the queer characters with needing to chafe against Regency values and expectations. Generally once I accepted this as a setting with great dresses where everyone with a brain is basically on board for gender equality and needs just a bit of education on trans issues, I was able to enjoy the book just fine, although the ending in particular is too pat, with some of the conflicts that define the whole book being waved away in a page or two.
I really enjoyed Phillipa in particular as a fat, femme character, and also Tommy as a non-binary character, portrayed pretty clearly despite not having that language. Other reviews have talked about how's a little weird that this is talked about or marketed as being sapphic or f/f, since Tommy isn't a woman; to me personally as a binary queer woman who speaks for absolutely no one but myself, sapphic feels potentially fuzzy enough to work (Tommy seems to feel some affinity with that word herself), but f/f or wlw does feel odd, as there's only one f here, and one w. It's interesting to see how f/f or wlw as neat categories for sorting content or marketing flattens the nuance of the portrayals in this book.
Speaking of marketing, this cover is very pretty, but it's eye-rollingly contrary to the spirit of the novel, with its fat and gender non-comforming protagonists.
On the whole, the bottom line is that I had a lot of fun reading this book. Just take the Regency setting with a grain of salt, and be prepared for some super-spies casually operating in the background.
I really enjoyed Phillipa in particular as a fat, femme character, and also Tommy as a non-binary character, portrayed pretty clearly despite not having that language. Other reviews have talked about how's a little weird that this is talked about or marketed as being sapphic or f/f, since Tommy isn't a woman; to me personally as a binary queer woman who speaks for absolutely no one but myself, sapphic feels potentially fuzzy enough to work (Tommy seems to feel some affinity with that word herself), but f/f or wlw does feel odd, as there's only one f here, and one w. It's interesting to see how f/f or wlw as neat categories for sorting content or marketing flattens the nuance of the portrayals in this book.
Speaking of marketing, this cover is very pretty, but it's eye-rollingly contrary to the spirit of the novel, with its fat and gender non-comforming protagonists.
On the whole, the bottom line is that I had a lot of fun reading this book. Just take the Regency setting with a grain of salt, and be prepared for some super-spies casually operating in the background.