Introduction
Published in June 2024 as Kate Young’s debut novel, its 4.1 amazon rating shows how highly this was received by the rom-com and queer community.
A Summary
Bette is in love for the very first time and she is convinced she has finally cracked the code to happiness. Then her girlfriend Mei suggests they take a break so Bette can experience the dating life she skipped before she came out. Bette decides she is absolutely fine. All she has to do is date a bunch of gorgeous women, have a lot of casual fun, learn a few things, and then return to Mei as a wiser, more seasoned version of herself. Easy. Totally manageable. No emotional spirals at all. What follows is a gloriously chaotic tour through queer dating that Bette never saw coming. One night, she is in a crappy hotel room trying to figure out what she wants, the next she is on a date that feels like a fever dream in a good way, and sometimes she is simply trying to remember why she agreed to any of this. Between the disasters, the surprises, the hookups, the heartbreaks, and the moments that feel like magic, Bette starts to realise that love refuses to follow a plan.
Writing Style
This is a singular POV novel, from the perspective of Bette, with chapters that are fairly short - around 10-20 pages on average.
My Thoughts
I struggled to rate this on a linear scale because I had such complex feelings about this novel - which was not what I signed up for. I wanted a cute queer romance novel that broke the typical mold in a casual way. Instead, I had an internal struggle trying to figure out what exactly went wrong here. Firstly, my biggest issue was with the plot progression itself. It’s made to be cute, but in my opinion it prioritised cuteness over the quality of it. Within the first 5-10%, I knew where the entire story was going and that ruined it for me for at least the first 50%. The later half of the novel was better, despite knowing what was going to happen, because it didn’t feel like it was trying to be something it wasn’t. The other main problem I was having is that I really couldn’t like the main character. I could empathize with the discussions around her sexuality, but I couldn’t stop sighing at how frustrating she was as a whole. She was incredibly naive and indecisive; letting others make life-altering decisions on her behalf and she wouldn’t see that anything was wrong. She was supposed to be a 30 year old woman, but it often felt like she was still a teenager, and it irked me. This isn’t an isolated issue either because it went on to affect all of the friendships in the book. Ash’s friendship with her felt mostly like a mother and child, or at least two sisters with a large age gap, and this is something that couldn’t be fixed once it had been established. However, having said this, I am always happy to read some queer romance, because it focuses on actual pleasure rather than the expectations that heterosexual relationships have pushed onto them, and this novel definitely contained that. It felt fun, and light-hearted, even in its darker moments, as well as the diversity shown. Often, bi-erasure is something I see even in queer fiction, and I was so happy to see bisexuality openly discussed here, with one of the most important characters identifying as bisexual. I also genuinely enjoyed the premise of an older queer woman getting the chance to be messy in a space that is free of judgements.
Recommendation
Despite my fairly disappointing experience, I really do recommend this. There is an audience for this book, and I think if I had gone into it just expecting a cutesy romance made queer then I would have enjoyed it more. If by 10% you aren’t enjoying it at all, then I would say to DNF, but otherwise it just gets better as it goes.
