Scan barcode
A review by themermaddie
You Shouldn't Have Come Here by Jeneva Rose
1.0
look, i know that the final plot twist might make this book work for some people, but one interesting idea in the very last chapter doesn't make up for an entire book of boring ass conversations and heavy handed foreshadowing.
this was an absolute miss from jevena rose unfortunately. i've really enjoyed her books in the past so this was a big let down for me. grace and calvin are both incredibly flat and boring, they recite backstories like they're in a bad high school theatre production, they somehow completely skip over the awkwardness of banging your airbnb host and go straight into devotion and thinking about the future together; girl you met like 4 days ago, be so fuckin for real. on top of that, the short chapters make the events of the book feel inconsequential instead of quick paced and exciting. charlotte's character sets the feminist movement back about 50 years; we should not be tolerating such ridiculous vapid stereotypes about the jealous woman archetype. not a single bit of foreshadowing here was done with any tact at all, it was like a neon sign pointing to whatever clue the author wanted us to notice; let us find things out for ourselves, you don't need to spoon feed it to us! ugh and don't even get me started on the metaphors in this book. it's like a middle school creative writing assignment where the author has just learned what a simile is, and it's entirely distracting every time something happens and grace or calvin has to take a moment in their internal monologue to muse thoughtfully about how this metaphor is just like life, actually.
the final twist... girl i ain't even gonna touch that one. this is the gotcha to end all gotchas, and not in a good way. it was such a cheap twist in like a "it was all a dream" sort of way, which is really disappointing because i think that if the twist happened 50% of the way through, we could've had a really interesting cat and mouse dynamic; instead the twist comes out of literally nowhere, and it just makes grace look even stupider for making all of those decisions in the context of the twist. it's really disappointing because i know that jeneva rose can write a good, suspense-filled story, but this isn't one of them.
this was an absolute miss from jevena rose unfortunately. i've really enjoyed her books in the past so this was a big let down for me. grace and calvin are both incredibly flat and boring, they recite backstories like they're in a bad high school theatre production, they somehow completely skip over the awkwardness of banging your airbnb host and go straight into devotion and thinking about the future together; girl you met like 4 days ago, be so fuckin for real. on top of that, the short chapters make the events of the book feel inconsequential instead of quick paced and exciting. charlotte's character sets the feminist movement back about 50 years; we should not be tolerating such ridiculous vapid stereotypes about the jealous woman archetype. not a single bit of foreshadowing here was done with any tact at all, it was like a neon sign pointing to whatever clue the author wanted us to notice; let us find things out for ourselves, you don't need to spoon feed it to us! ugh and don't even get me started on the metaphors in this book. it's like a middle school creative writing assignment where the author has just learned what a simile is, and it's entirely distracting every time something happens and grace or calvin has to take a moment in their internal monologue to muse thoughtfully about how this metaphor is just like life, actually.
the final twist... girl i ain't even gonna touch that one. this is the gotcha to end all gotchas, and not in a good way. it was such a cheap twist in like a "it was all a dream" sort of way, which is really disappointing because i think that if the twist happened 50% of the way through, we could've had a really interesting cat and mouse dynamic; instead the twist comes out of literally nowhere, and it just makes grace look even stupider for making all of those decisions in the context of the twist. it's really disappointing because i know that jeneva rose can write a good, suspense-filled story, but this isn't one of them.