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A review by crispycritter
Birding with Benefits by Sarah T. Dubb
Did not finish book. Stopped at 57%.
Look, sometimes we deeply, depply relate to books in a good way. Sometimes books just strike a nerve, in a very very bad way. Birding With Benefits was the latter.
I get the desire to write FMCs with flaws. Personally I think Dubb went a bit too far - making Celeste unlikeable/uninteresting/not engaging enough that I didn't want to root for her to fall in love. She was already reading as cringey 42-year-old Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Someone forgot to seal the time capsule! Another awful blast from the past has risen from the depths and she's just as cringey but with wrinkles! Representation? Making her a clueless, hurtful parent was the last straw.
Perhaps there is some third-act climax where Celeste has an ah-ha moment. But girl - this isn't women's fic. I'm here to watch two people fall in love. And Celeste's flaws as a human were pushed so far to the front of my mind that they undermined my interest in Celeste's love life and my belief that she was even capable of loving John. That she even deserved someone like him. The book's hook (Celeste steamrolling John into the "fake dating") was just one of many symptoms indicating she was not doing ok and was not ready to date. She needed to go to therapy, talk about her lingering bitterness towards her ex-husband, her need to control and dictate her daughter's future without taking her daughter's feelings into consideration (more steamrolling), and to understand why she was engaged in this relentless pursuit to say yes to weird shit. One of two requirements for a book to be a romance is that it ends with a HEA or a HFN - and I just don't see how the Celeste that I read about halfway through the book was gonna be able to get there with The Most Perfect Man Ever John (that's a diss).
Petition for someone to write a fanfic about John and Chris. I need a do-over.
I get the desire to write FMCs with flaws. Personally I think Dubb went a bit too far - making Celeste unlikeable/uninteresting/not engaging enough that I didn't want to root for her to fall in love. She was already reading as cringey 42-year-old Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Someone forgot to seal the time capsule! Another awful blast from the past has risen from the depths and she's just as cringey but with wrinkles! Representation? Making her a clueless, hurtful parent was the last straw.
Perhaps there is some third-act climax where Celeste has an ah-ha moment. But girl - this isn't women's fic. I'm here to watch two people fall in love. And Celeste's flaws as a human were pushed so far to the front of my mind that they undermined my interest in Celeste's love life and my belief that she was even capable of loving John. That she even deserved someone like him. The book's hook (Celeste steamrolling John into the "fake dating") was just one of many symptoms indicating she was not doing ok and was not ready to date. She needed to go to therapy, talk about her lingering bitterness towards her ex-husband, her need to control and dictate her daughter's future without taking her daughter's feelings into consideration (more steamrolling), and to understand why she was engaged in this relentless pursuit to say yes to weird shit. One of two requirements for a book to be a romance is that it ends with a HEA or a HFN - and I just don't see how the Celeste that I read about halfway through the book was gonna be able to get there with The Most Perfect Man Ever John (that's a diss).
Petition for someone to write a fanfic about John and Chris. I need a do-over.
Other things I did not like:
- Referring to a 35 year old character as middle aged (it's not). As being an old mom for having a baby at 35 (woof. Don't we get enough of this shame in real life? Couldn't we at least gently push back on this in fucking escapist fiction instead of making it seem like Maria made a 'middle aged' woopsie she and her partner are making the best of?).
- John, a 'real' woodworker, letting Celeste touch his tools. Doing anything sexual in his shop. I know, I know. It's just fiction. Get out of the shop, Celeste.