.....um? Maybe it just didn't resonate with me. Based on the summary, I was expecting it to be a little more introspective, kind of like a bell jar situation, but to me this book seemed like something the Oloixarac didn't want to write. After the moment in the beginning where she talks about the difficulty of putting out a second book as a writer and how identity politics play a role in selecting writers to idolize in America, I began looking at this book through that sarcastic lens, trying to figure out if she wrote this book as a testament/example to those ideas, or if that was just a facet of Mona, the character. I ended up feeling like it was the former. The book just felt very surface level and "anti-book", as if she threw a story together to act as a tool for social commentary for her publisher or team or whatever to read rather than a book to be enjoyed by public readers. And then on top of that, this book was borderline smut, which might've had a deeper meaning given the context of the end, idk, but the amount of sexuality in the book didn't seem to serve a purpose beyond possibly a commentary on the prevalence of sex culture in American media and sex politics/DL people in other regions of the world, but I might be reaching with that one. It would've made sense for it to have related to the hypersexuality that can be developed by victims of abuse as a PTSD response following their abuse, but she never drew that connection in the book so I remain feeling like the amount of sexuality just didn't serve the book any purpose (especially with it being a short book, the amount of sexual scenes seemed like a poor use of limited time to tell the story). I enjoyed the globalized perspectives she included in the book to an extent, but wasn't a fan of how she just seemed to make EVERYTHING so sardonic. I get that that's a character trait for Mona, and maybe even a coping response, but I feel like the book 1, lacked depth because Mona didn't seem to have any other facets besides her being a massive contrarian, and 2, confused me about whether or not I was allowed to enjoy the book because everything that was happening in it was something Mona was mocking. Even the unfolding of the answer we had been waiting for the whole novel was told and not shown, which made for an anti-climatic end to a buildup. And then the ending of the book???? Girl what lol. I feel like it completely stripped the book of any of its strong qualities and made it feel silly, as if she gave up and just wrote something insane so it would be over with. There were some good things though. It was interesting to place myself in the world of a writer and see through the eyes of someone in the literary world. I'm not normally a fan of fictional books where one of the characters is a writer because I feel like it negatively impacts the books immersiveness in the same way making a painting of paint supplies would, but it was interesting reading about the politics and social gimmicks writers are intertwined in--kind of like a little sociology field study.
I do understand her disdain for identity politics and the idea of tokenizing writers of color, but I also appreciate the mobility tokenization in the literary world gives writers of color in a country that would otherwise ignore them. I don't know of another way diversity can be expected in a country that has such a deep history of erasure of voices of color. Overall, I don't blame anyone for enjoying the book if it was their cup of tea, just wasn't my taste :).