This was fine and fun, though it was a little bit caught up with never making its mind whether it was a romance without a lot of romance or a roman à clef or just general fiction, and it especially had so much fun namedropping Silicon Valley shit that I think occasionally Zhao forgot when she was both namedropping real people AND namedropping the made-up versions of them as if they exist in the same universe, so that was sloppy.

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Like there's a Kim Kardashian reference in a made-up character but also actual Kim Kardashian is referenced a few pages later.

Basically I think the failure here is in editing--a tighter novel would have picked either namedropping or clef-dropping, not both, and also I found myself constantly getting caught up with how the author's Singaporean-tinged, British-influenced English influenced all of the characters and the way they spoke, even though they were all supposed to be American-born, and it just kept throwing me because the rhythm was often off, the way they formed sentences wasn't accurate to the dialect of English they were supposed to be speaking, and the word choice was often British. Again, editing should have caught this! Do people not have internal ears when they read? (And write, not to place all the blame on editorial?) Sometimes I feel like Mugatu and like I'm the only person who notices when the wrong English for the location is being used in books and everyone else acts like they have no idea that English even has multiple dialects, which is actually like Mugatu but also a reverse Mugatu because what he notices is that they're all the same look, but anyway, I digress..

I can't tell whether

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Lillian's obvious protection and predatory-cock-blocking (as in, blocking a predatory cock, not predatorily cock-blocking was obvious to me because I'm older than Zoe and I would have been just as dumb as Zoe at her age or if it was silly because Zoomers seem to be more aware of shit like that than I would have been even ten years ago?? Like there were many moments while I was reading this book where I just did not find things believable, but I honestly don't know if that's me being crotchety and old or if Zoe was just extremely wide-eyed and impressionable. I dunno. She felt off as a character to me.