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A review by cass_lit
The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic by Breanne Randall
Did not finish book. Stopped at 55%.
Finally gave up and DNF’d at Chapter 10. This will probably be a minority opinion, because I know everyone is raving about this book right now. It will certainly be for some people, but it was not for me.
I tried. I really tried. I wanted to love this so much. I’ve been curious about the book since the author first started posting about it on tiktok. I’m reading on kindle so I don’t know exactly, but I’m pretty sure I’m over 50% in; I could speed read the rest and be done with it but I’m having such a bad time right now that I don’t want to.
My first red flag was a JKR comment. I know that it’s not necessarily support of her views and I still use HP things I got before JKR turned into a horrible TERF, but I’m of the opinion that there’s no reason for a book to be published in 2023 with those kind of references. Hell, people are even *republishing* books to get rid of those references. We also got weirdly attached to and incredibly defensive of (for no reason) the small town church for a few pages pretty soon in, and that’s when I realized this was NOT the Gilmore Girls brand of small town charm I was hoping for.
Which leads me to my next point — this is marketed as “Practical Magic meets Gilmore Girls.” I do understand them both — there’s magic and the cooky matriarch of Practical Magic and the small town, everybody-is-in-everybody’s-business of Gilmore Girls. But there is none of the wit, or the smartness, or feminism, or (at least that I had felt yet) deep love of either of those. I actually hated the small town in this. Maybe I’m biased because I am not from a small town, but god was I tired of people (Jake 👀) just walking into other people’s homes. I wasn’t attached to Seth and Sadie as twins/siblings because Seth gone from the start, and the payoff was not worth it when he eventually came back. Maybe once we got his whole story it would’ve been (I have suspicions), but I was too tired of reading about these 2 together to get there. I have 4 siblings (one of which is is only 11 months younger than me) and have a twin niece and nephew so I know the dynamic, yet their arguing was far more annoying than anything I’ve experienced in real life (and they’re FULL GROWN ADULTS). And Racquel completely changed as a character when Seth came back and I was not here for it.
Now. Jake.
Jake sucks. From the moment Jake came back, I thought he sucked. I didn’t understand their connections at all because 1) they lacked any chemistry, and 2) they seemed to have dated for a few months when they were eighteen and still haven’t gotten over it a decade later. Sadie was full on teen girl-ing it around him and Jake was creepily obsessed with her (I would’ve been considering a restraining order after about the third time he continued to hang around after she said she didn’t want to see him). But boy oh boy, Jake is actually ultimately the reason I DNF’d. In chapter 9, approximately halfway through the book, Jake FINALLY tells Sadie why he’s back and what he’s up to (in his defense, for the last chapter he’s tried to tell Sadie a few times and she literally just *runs away* every time). That twist not for me, especially given how he’s been acting the whole first half. My eye rolls were heavy. And then he goes on to explain why he just can’t live in the city any more because there are “turf wars” and “gangs” “and drugs and violence and prostitution.” Literally all of those are contained his monologue complaint. And I get that it would be hard to be in an emergency responder situation there — I certainly couldn’t do it — but god, cry me a river about how hard YOUR life is. Now he just HAS to movehis fiancé and baby into the house directly in Sadie’s backyard that they used to dream about refurbishing together, which he continually complains about, because where else would he move?
But really, what it ultimately came down to is that I can’t imagine an ending to this book that will really satisfy me knowing what I know now about all of our characters. So if I’m not going to even enjoy it in the end, it’s not worth not enjoying everything else when there are so many other fall, witchy, cozy books I want to read right now.
I tried. I really tried. I wanted to love this so much. I’ve been curious about the book since the author first started posting about it on tiktok. I’m reading on kindle so I don’t know exactly, but I’m pretty sure I’m over 50% in; I could speed read the rest and be done with it but I’m having such a bad time right now that I don’t want to.
My first red flag was a JKR comment. I know that it’s not necessarily support of her views and I still use HP things I got before JKR turned into a horrible TERF, but I’m of the opinion that there’s no reason for a book to be published in 2023 with those kind of references. Hell, people are even *republishing* books to get rid of those references. We also got weirdly attached to and incredibly defensive of (for no reason) the small town church for a few pages pretty soon in, and that’s when I realized this was NOT the Gilmore Girls brand of small town charm I was hoping for.
Which leads me to my next point — this is marketed as “Practical Magic meets Gilmore Girls.” I do understand them both — there’s magic and the cooky matriarch of Practical Magic and the small town, everybody-is-in-everybody’s-business of Gilmore Girls. But there is none of the wit, or the smartness, or feminism, or (at least that I had felt yet) deep love of either of those. I actually hated the small town in this. Maybe I’m biased because I am not from a small town, but god was I tired of people (Jake 👀) just walking into other people’s homes. I wasn’t attached to Seth and Sadie as twins/siblings because Seth gone from the start, and the payoff was not worth it when he eventually came back. Maybe once we got his whole story it would’ve been (I have suspicions), but I was too tired of reading about these 2 together to get there. I have 4 siblings (one of which is is only 11 months younger than me) and have a twin niece and nephew so I know the dynamic, yet their arguing was far more annoying than anything I’ve experienced in real life (and they’re FULL GROWN ADULTS). And Racquel completely changed as a character when Seth came back and I was not here for it.
Now. Jake.
Jake sucks. From the moment Jake came back, I thought he sucked. I didn’t understand their connections at all because 1) they lacked any chemistry, and 2) they seemed to have dated for a few months when they were eighteen and still haven’t gotten over it a decade later. Sadie was full on teen girl-ing it around him and Jake was creepily obsessed with her (I would’ve been considering a restraining order after about the third time he continued to hang around after she said she didn’t want to see him). But boy oh boy, Jake is actually ultimately the reason I DNF’d. In chapter 9, approximately halfway through the book, Jake FINALLY tells Sadie why he’s back and what he’s up to (in his defense, for the last chapter he’s tried to tell Sadie a few times and she literally just *runs away* every time). That twist not for me, especially given how he’s been acting the whole first half. My eye rolls were heavy. And then he goes on to explain why he just can’t live in the city any more because there are “turf wars” and “gangs” “and drugs and violence and prostitution.” Literally all of those are contained his monologue complaint. And I get that it would be hard to be in an emergency responder situation there — I certainly couldn’t do it — but god, cry me a river about how hard YOUR life is. Now he just HAS to move
But really, what it ultimately came down to is that I can’t imagine an ending to this book that will really satisfy me knowing what I know now about all of our characters. So if I’m not going to even enjoy it in the end, it’s not worth not enjoying everything else when there are so many other fall, witchy, cozy books I want to read right now.