A review by lezreadalot
Book Boyfriend by Kris Ripper

3.0

What would he see if he read my book? Would he see chaos or order? Would he see me or himself, or both of us, or neither of us?

Halfway through reading this, I happened to look at the rating on Goodreads, and when I saw that it was so comparatively low, I was pretty confused? This is so entertaining, so witty, full of quips, with an anxious, self-deprecating but ultimately very lovable protagonist who is head over heels in love with his best friend. It's slow burn, friends to lovers, single POV, and turns some typical romance conventions on their heads. All those things are things that I adore, but now that I've finished the book, I think that maybe all of them didn't work together squeezed into one 300 page novel.  

At this point, I've sat with this book for a few hours, and I think I can articulate why I didn't absolutely love it the way I was sure I was going to in the first half. A couple things first: I'm really glad that I read this via audiobook. I'm not sure that I would have found PK as charming and relatable as I did if I had actually had to read him. He's a protagonist that will probably take some growing for a lot of people, and his very rambly, absent-minded, prone to going off on tangents before snapping back to the point style of narration might not work for everyone. It really did work for me while listening to it. And I didn't mind that he was the single POV that we got in this romance. I say it all the time, but I really do love a single POV romance, especially when the author manages to help the reader get to know the secondary character and see all the reasons why the secondary character loves the protagonist, without us ever getting their POV. I don't think this book succeeded quite as well with that. I really like Art as a character, but I don't feel like I know them, and I didn't feel half the emotion from them as I felt from PK. Which is a shame, because it's not like I want this to be dual POV. I just wanted the writing to give us a bit more insight into Art, instead of PK all the time.  

Slow burn is my absolute favourite thing, especially when paired with friends to lovers. I really liked that aspect of this book, and just how much PK is non-stop pining for Art. His internal monologue was really entertaining, and really funny, and really helped endear him to me. My only problem was that the main conflict of this book has to do with grand gestures, particularly those done publicly and for the wrong reasons, and I'm not sure how to explain it, but for me, it just didn't work like I might have thought it would have, and it didn't evoke the emotions I was expecting it to. I don't know. I adore the point that is being made, as I said, because some public displays of affection in books, particularly in the third act, often leave me reeling. This, everything about how it was done, was so realistically and carefully and lovingly portrayed, how both characters felt. But the fact that it was done when they were at a particular stage in their relationship/friendship, and there was a pretty big secret/misunderstanding between them... I have no idea how to articulate it, but from the conflict onwards, I just felt very meh about the book. Even though it was talking about things and dealing with things in a way that I love.  

There really is nothing major about this book that I did not like. This is just, again, that bewildering sense of wrong-footedness when you know that you could have liked a book a lot more than you actually do. Just a bit of a bummer, especially when I really like the premise, I really like the writing, I really like the conversations about sexuality and gender, (and the casual pronoun change) and I really adore all the characters.  

Listened to the audiobook as read by Pete Cross, which I really, really loved. I think this is my second experience with him, and it was just as good as the first. He put all of the humour into PK's narration and inner monologue and made this such a fun, light book to listen to, even when it got kind of heavy. This is a narrator I'll be looking out for a bit more. And I know I'll read from this author again.  

I held so much hope in my chest, that sometimes it felt like it would explode inside me. Or maybe that was just my heart, beating for Art, whether they knew it or not.