So... yeah, no. I still don't know what this book was trying to tell me.

It started super interesting, even hilarious, then disappointed me at every turn and left me with a lot of regrets.

Was it a horror story? A comment on higher education? I have the feeling it was trying to be, but it never made its point. And it was just so in love with itself.

I mean, the prose is really good. Mona Awad can do wonderful things with words. This story was definitely not the best way to show it.

Every character in this book is an asshole. Which would have been totally fine, if
a) I wouldn't have gotten the impression the author wanted me to actually like the main character, and
b) all that assholery would have culminated in some greater point.

The protagonist is sour, hates everyone and is very in love with her own self-pity, because things are never her fault, of course. She whines and lies to basically everybody in her life. And when you look past her inner monologue, she rarely ever actually does something and takes action. Oh, and she also hates women, because she's not like the other girls.

Maybe it was making a point about the characters and how everyone is flawed. But in order to do that, the characters were just too flat, too one-dimensional. Everyone is judgemental, juvenile and the story is women hating on women.

How about the magic? Well, that was a really cool concept, but we nerver learned enough about it for this book to be about that. We never even learned enough about the potential of this magic beyond creating boys. Seriously - those women are aspiring writers studying at an elite school and all they think about in their free time is... men?

Also, the protagonist literally creates a man to do everything for her that she is too passive to do. That is some serious lesson there.

So... in the end, this book left me with a very bad feeling about what the author thinks about herself, her work and other women.