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A review by apauliner
The Pairing by Casey McQuiston
Very disappointed to say, I did not like this book.
I’m getting older and wiser, and the thought of 3 weeks of eating too much and drinking too much actually exHAUSTS me. I want three weeks of good sleep, lots of greens, and at least 2L of water when it’s too hot to think straight.
I don’t mind lots of good sex but I DO mind people using other people’s bodies to forget about their problems, and I DO mind the unexpected and unpleasant voyeurism kink (the Barcelona scene? I wanted to die and not in a good way).
I realised several things reading The Pairing:
- I don’t like second chance romances because it’s rarely well done. The two long lost lovers always still love each other and got separated because of the one thing I hate most: miscommunication, and here it’s just plain stupid I hated that.
- I may well be a very conservative European bisexual woman, because I was rolling my eyes every time Theo and Kit encountered a stranger willing to fuck them after 2 secs of flirting. I have never seen this side of Europe. Is it hidden behind the rampant rise of fascism and hate crimes? I remember one line that had me seething: “it seems like a waste not to have sex with someone who saved you from a shark”. Is it tho? Is it really?
- I dislike long descriptions of art pieces or food because it’s very often pompous and self-absorbed. Art is beautiful and food is delicious, but it’s very difficult to translate that into words in a novel and here it felt to me like a verbose soup of pretentiousness. I have seen Barcelona, Florence, Paris, and all I could read in this book was cliché upon cliché.
When the book is in Rome, I was forced to think about Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, where two bisexual people are in Rome and try to coexist. The comparison was not in favour of The Pairing.
I disliked Theo’s nepo crybaby struggles and FOR DOG’S SAKE, why does every romcom get a dead parent for easy trauma character building?
I have nothing to say regarding the queerness of the characters because it was very nice reading about two bisexual people, one of them being non-binary. Their coming out was very nice.
I did not laugh, I did not swoon, I got horny in the very mechanical way of reading sex scene upon sex scene but it felt bad, like binging porn to fill a void in your soul. But I have no void in my soul, so it was a bit nauseating. This book was, sadly, not for me.
PS: I am not cancelling my love for Casey’s work, and will read their next book with benevolent attention.
I’m getting older and wiser, and the thought of 3 weeks of eating too much and drinking too much actually exHAUSTS me. I want three weeks of good sleep, lots of greens, and at least 2L of water when it’s too hot to think straight.
I don’t mind lots of good sex but I DO mind people using other people’s bodies to forget about their problems, and I DO mind the unexpected and unpleasant voyeurism kink (the Barcelona scene? I wanted to die and not in a good way).
I realised several things reading The Pairing:
- I don’t like second chance romances because it’s rarely well done. The two long lost lovers always still love each other and got separated because of the one thing I hate most: miscommunication, and here it’s just plain stupid I hated that.
- I may well be a very conservative European bisexual woman, because I was rolling my eyes every time Theo and Kit encountered a stranger willing to fuck them after 2 secs of flirting. I have never seen this side of Europe. Is it hidden behind the rampant rise of fascism and hate crimes? I remember one line that had me seething: “it seems like a waste not to have sex with someone who saved you from a shark”. Is it tho? Is it really?
- I dislike long descriptions of art pieces or food because it’s very often pompous and self-absorbed. Art is beautiful and food is delicious, but it’s very difficult to translate that into words in a novel and here it felt to me like a verbose soup of pretentiousness. I have seen Barcelona, Florence, Paris, and all I could read in this book was cliché upon cliché.
When the book is in Rome, I was forced to think about Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, where two bisexual people are in Rome and try to coexist. The comparison was not in favour of The Pairing.
I disliked Theo’s nepo crybaby struggles and FOR DOG’S SAKE, why does every romcom get a dead parent for easy trauma character building?
I have nothing to say regarding the queerness of the characters because it was very nice reading about two bisexual people, one of them being non-binary. Their coming out was very nice.
I did not laugh, I did not swoon, I got horny in the very mechanical way of reading sex scene upon sex scene but it felt bad, like binging porn to fill a void in your soul. But I have no void in my soul, so it was a bit nauseating. This book was, sadly, not for me.
PS: I am not cancelling my love for Casey’s work, and will read their next book with benevolent attention.