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cassandrackcity 's review for:
The Pairing
by Casey McQuiston
I wanted to like the pairing so much since I’m such a huge fan of all of CMQ’s other works. Unfortunately, this was just so thuddingly hollow that I couldn’t bring myself to care about a single person or event in these pages.
The descriptions were lush and decadent, and get extremely old extremely quickly when you realize desserts and wines have more depth than the characters. So much of Kit and Theo’s growth and development happen off page, in the years between the prologue and chapter one. You’re told a lot about these characters, but rarely shown anything. This felt like a really beautiful and overly long brochure for a eurotrip.
Beyond that, I don’t think I care about the plight of a nepo baby. If there was anything interesting to say about Theo’s perspective, it was abandoned in favour of a dick joke. I liked kit’s chapters better because seeing Theo form his perspective was a little less insufferable, but barely.
What I love so much about mcquiston’s work is how it always has such a lovely thread of queer history and community running through it but that was so lacking from these. None of the side characters were that memorable and every single person in Europe apparently wanted to fuck kit and theo – they were beating back horny locals with sticks – it didn’t feel like anyone was viewed as much more than an object. Also, not to nitpick but I hate when romances act like safe sex practices are uncool or just ignore them all together, and with the number of partners Kit and Theo have in this book, it would have been nice to see like any mention of this to their partners – someone needs to read the ethical slut.
This book could have been much shorter – there isn’t enough substance for 400 pages. I also found that in comparison to CMQ’s previous works, the quality of writing was extremely disappointing. Knowing French also made this a bit more difficult to read, because the bad translations or unrealistic dialogue would throw me off every time.
The descriptions were lush and decadent, and get extremely old extremely quickly when you realize desserts and wines have more depth than the characters. So much of Kit and Theo’s growth and development happen off page, in the years between the prologue and chapter one. You’re told a lot about these characters, but rarely shown anything. This felt like a really beautiful and overly long brochure for a eurotrip.
Beyond that, I don’t think I care about the plight of a nepo baby. If there was anything interesting to say about Theo’s perspective, it was abandoned in favour of a dick joke. I liked kit’s chapters better because seeing Theo form his perspective was a little less insufferable, but barely.
What I love so much about mcquiston’s work is how it always has such a lovely thread of queer history and community running through it but that was so lacking from these. None of the side characters were that memorable and every single person in Europe apparently wanted to fuck kit and theo – they were beating back horny locals with sticks – it didn’t feel like anyone was viewed as much more than an object. Also, not to nitpick but I hate when romances act like safe sex practices are uncool or just ignore them all together, and with the number of partners Kit and Theo have in this book, it would have been nice to see like any mention of this to their partners – someone needs to read the ethical slut.
This book could have been much shorter – there isn’t enough substance for 400 pages. I also found that in comparison to CMQ’s previous works, the quality of writing was extremely disappointing. Knowing French also made this a bit more difficult to read, because the bad translations or unrealistic dialogue would throw me off every time.