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A review by crispycritter
Pickleballers by Ilana Long
1.0
DNFed at 208/56%
Quite possibly one of the worst romances I’ve read in a long time. This was everything that is cringey and cliche about early 2000s rom coms, with a heroine who was quirky for quirky’s sake. The prose was so quippy it was unpleasant. Meg couldn’t have a conversation with Ethan where she wasn’t zoning out and thinking about his manicured nails, cargo shorts, and unmentionables. This often felt like a travelogue where our narrator explained the PNW, including , bizarrely, the history of the Japanese-American exclusion and internment, which felt wildly out of place and was another painful point of cringe. If you’re gonna bring up one of the darkest points of American history in a rom com, ya know, do something with it - don’t use it as window dressing to bump up your page count. And finally, the use of pickle to modify other words. I’d call them pickle puns, but they’re not. Everything about this picklereading experience picklehurt me, other than the snarky annotations I left in the paperback I unfortunately bought.
Quite possibly one of the worst romances I’ve read in a long time. This was everything that is cringey and cliche about early 2000s rom coms, with a heroine who was quirky for quirky’s sake. The prose was so quippy it was unpleasant. Meg couldn’t have a conversation with Ethan where she wasn’t zoning out and thinking about his manicured nails, cargo shorts, and unmentionables. This often felt like a travelogue where our narrator explained the PNW, including , bizarrely, the history of the Japanese-American exclusion and internment, which felt wildly out of place and was another painful point of cringe. If you’re gonna bring up one of the darkest points of American history in a rom com, ya know, do something with it - don’t use it as window dressing to bump up your page count. And finally, the use of pickle to modify other words. I’d call them pickle puns, but they’re not. Everything about this picklereading experience picklehurt me, other than the snarky annotations I left in the paperback I unfortunately bought.