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A review by 1943tre
Someone Just Like You by Meredith Schorr
2.0
Oh man lol I disliked this a lot. I loved the cover and I often enjoy a childhood enemies to lovers vibe, but this was NOT it, and I wouldn’t recommend this. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t steamy, and in the end, I wasn’t rooting for them as a couple. Honestly, I’m not quite sure who the right reader for this is.
Because to enjoy this, firstly, you need to be delighted by PRANKS. And not even clever pranks, but silly ones. Dumb ones. Jude and Molly are just constantly annoying each other, and they’ve been doing this since childhood. That’s already a big con to me, but I’ve gotten over this kind of thing before—I actually did enjoy You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle. But in this book, neither Jude nor Molly are redeeming enough individually nor electric enough together to overcome the immaturity of their behavior. Jude in particular was not sexy in the slightest to me. He wore cargo shorts and “waggled his eyebrows” and did the moonwalk and called Molly “sweetie pie” and was constantly humming Beatles songs. You’re telling me this man is a 27-year-old New Yorker in the year 2023? There’s no way.
Together, it was, like, worse. The steam was some of the worst steam I’ve ever read. They had their first kiss and he was inside her like a paragraph later. There was literally no sexual tension, no build-up, no foreplay. And grosser, Molly kept calling sex “getting it done” and Jude’s erection his “wood.” Jude kept calling it “banging.” Who are these people lmao. It’s things like these that are so jarring. It just feels clear that the author doesn’t know how people the characters’ age/demographic actually talk.
The only thing I liked was Molly has a secret of a prank she took too far, and I appreciated that it WAS actually quite bad. I thought it would make for a bad fight. But that too fizzled out! He was pissed and then it was forgiven like very quickly. There was nothing tense about this book at all.
I didn’t hate the career subplot, but that’s not at all what I go for romance for. This was just really a slog to get through, without much to redeem it. I feel so bad for leaving this kind of review, and it sounds like many reviewers genuinely liked the author’s debut, but I’m not sure if I’d even want to read it considering how bleh I felt about this one.
Because to enjoy this, firstly, you need to be delighted by PRANKS. And not even clever pranks, but silly ones. Dumb ones. Jude and Molly are just constantly annoying each other, and they’ve been doing this since childhood. That’s already a big con to me, but I’ve gotten over this kind of thing before—I actually did enjoy You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle. But in this book, neither Jude nor Molly are redeeming enough individually nor electric enough together to overcome the immaturity of their behavior. Jude in particular was not sexy in the slightest to me. He wore cargo shorts and “waggled his eyebrows” and did the moonwalk and called Molly “sweetie pie” and was constantly humming Beatles songs. You’re telling me this man is a 27-year-old New Yorker in the year 2023? There’s no way.
Together, it was, like, worse. The steam was some of the worst steam I’ve ever read. They had their first kiss and he was inside her like a paragraph later. There was literally no sexual tension, no build-up, no foreplay. And grosser, Molly kept calling sex “getting it done” and Jude’s erection his “wood.” Jude kept calling it “banging.” Who are these people lmao. It’s things like these that are so jarring. It just feels clear that the author doesn’t know how people the characters’ age/demographic actually talk.
The only thing I liked was Molly has a secret of a prank she took too far, and I appreciated that it WAS actually quite bad. I thought it would make for a bad fight. But that too fizzled out! He was pissed and then it was forgiven like very quickly. There was nothing tense about this book at all.
I didn’t hate the career subplot, but that’s not at all what I go for romance for. This was just really a slog to get through, without much to redeem it. I feel so bad for leaving this kind of review, and it sounds like many reviewers genuinely liked the author’s debut, but I’m not sure if I’d even want to read it considering how bleh I felt about this one.