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I immediately docked this book a star for using the word "nether-kitty." I'll let you guess what the protagonist was referring to here. I think that's a pretty accurate summation of the cringey, boring, poorly written, cis-het narrative that is "Shipped."
I knew right away that I probably was not going to vibe with this book, but since I was busy packing up my whole apartment to move across the planet, I decided to just let it drone on in the background. I suppose "Shipped" is good if you're in the middle of a mindless, robotic task and need something, ANYTHING to distract you from the work at hand. I'm a fan of the whole enemies to lovers trope and travel narratives, so I decided to give this one a chance and let it play out. M I S T A K E.
The characters are SO flat! Zero personality. Zero romantic chemistry. Henley is a boorish workaholic who hates her work nemesis Graeme, despite having a weak and misguided reason for doing so. Graeme is nice enough, but extremely generic and dry as a literal stale graham cracker. For some reason he's been in love with Henley for some time from seeing her through weekly Zoom meetings despite her extremely uptight and generally unpleasant personality. Henley's sister Walsh is cast as the "train wreck" fun-loving sister who has an incredibly lame and haphazardly written plot thread about an abusive boyfriend dubbed "Bad News Bears" (deadass, that is his name in her phone). Nikolai is a creepy Russian guy who continually makes unwanted advances on Henley until we realize that hey! He's not REALLY a bad guy! He's just weird because his heart was broken! As if that somehow makes being a creepy who can't take a polite hint to fuck off okay.
This book is trying very hard to be a #girlboss narrative, and while I appreciated some aspects of this, I wasn't reading it to try and ~empower~ myself in the workplace. I was reading it for the fluffy, easy romance factor and sadly, this book does not deliver. The author even dipped out of writing a proper sex scene not once, but THREE times! Like obviously not every romance needs to delve into that territory but it's kind of lame to do the whole "conveniently interrupted/fade to black" thing three separate times. Although, I'm not really sure I want to read a sex scene when the protagonist unironically uses words like "nether-kitty."
I read this cause I was desperate for some mindless romance and it was available for instant delivery from the library. Perhaps you will enjoy it too, if you are feeling as desperate and uncritical as I was at the time. Otherwise, I would skip this one.
I knew right away that I probably was not going to vibe with this book, but since I was busy packing up my whole apartment to move across the planet, I decided to just let it drone on in the background. I suppose "Shipped" is good if you're in the middle of a mindless, robotic task and need something, ANYTHING to distract you from the work at hand. I'm a fan of the whole enemies to lovers trope and travel narratives, so I decided to give this one a chance and let it play out. M I S T A K E.
The characters are SO flat! Zero personality. Zero romantic chemistry. Henley is a boorish workaholic who hates her work nemesis Graeme, despite having a weak and misguided reason for doing so. Graeme is nice enough, but extremely generic and dry as a literal stale graham cracker. For some reason he's been in love with Henley for some time from seeing her through weekly Zoom meetings despite her extremely uptight and generally unpleasant personality. Henley's sister Walsh is cast as the "train wreck" fun-loving sister who has an incredibly lame and haphazardly written plot thread about an abusive boyfriend dubbed "Bad News Bears" (deadass, that is his name in her phone). Nikolai is a creepy Russian guy who continually makes unwanted advances on Henley until we realize that hey! He's not REALLY a bad guy! He's just weird because his heart was broken! As if that somehow makes being a creepy who can't take a polite hint to fuck off okay.
This book is trying very hard to be a #girlboss narrative, and while I appreciated some aspects of this, I wasn't reading it to try and ~empower~ myself in the workplace. I was reading it for the fluffy, easy romance factor and sadly, this book does not deliver. The author even dipped out of writing a proper sex scene not once, but THREE times! Like obviously not every romance needs to delve into that territory but it's kind of lame to do the whole "conveniently interrupted/fade to black" thing three separate times. Although, I'm not really sure I want to read a sex scene when the protagonist unironically uses words like "nether-kitty."
I read this cause I was desperate for some mindless romance and it was available for instant delivery from the library. Perhaps you will enjoy it too, if you are feeling as desperate and uncritical as I was at the time. Otherwise, I would skip this one.