wchereads's reviews
376 reviews

The art is absolutely gorgeous though I wish Miss Ivy was in her "Land Back" Era instead

Also this is shockingly timely

This sucks so bad

note: this review will contain spoiler for the plotline involving MMC and his parents.

The MMC was kicked out from his parents' place for having "drugs" in his room that he was planning to sell later when he was 19 years old. The drugs were weed. He moved in with his best friend and best friend's partner and essentially pulled himself up by his bootstrap and now owned a plumber business. By the time the book started, the MMC hadn't talked to his parents for over ten years.

Meeting the FMC and her child had convinced him to attempt reconcilation with his parents. This is when the book really disappointed. Yes, his father was wrong but so did he for not reaching out in over a decade, apparently. His father never even apologized outright. Instead, the MMC tried to justify his actions because his uncle died by "going down the wrong path" and his dad reacted so harshly "for his own good." So are we going to talk about how putting a 19-yo BLACK YOUNG MAN out on the street makes him MORE vulnerable??? And what is this weird demonization/dehumanization of "the drug-selling criminals"? We all know how the drugs got circulated in gentrified/predominantly Black neighbourhoods to begin with, right? (It's the cops. This isn't a conspiracy theory.) Plus, what WAS the circumstance that pushed his uncle to sell drugs? That pushed MMC's friend and almost MMC himself to do the same thing??? It is definitely not just greed or laziness or a desire to "make a quick buck." This idea is so dangerous. The author didn't address any of it. I was really enjoying the fluff and the romance but this part of the story just killed it completely for me.

Let me get what I liked about the book out of the way so that I can rant about how much I didn't like it: I liked the author's emphasis on open and honest communication with the partner(s) in your relationship(s). That's actually a solid advice.

The author is VERY trans exclusive despite having used the LGBTQ+ acronym in the book a couple of times. what does he think the T in LGBTQ+ stand for???
 

when there have literally been trans men who have wombs and chose to go through pregnancy... Really a surprise to no one but this book also made no mentions of how class or race can affect relationship dynamic. I read The Ace & Aro Relationship Guide earlier this year and even though the author is yt, they at least acknowledged their privileges and stressed on the importance of collective liberation multiple times. Ironic that the author wrote an article titled "Is it time to retire the word 'privileged'?" while being either completely unaware of or refusing to acknowledge his own privileges.

I also read Radical Intimacy (https://www.instagram.com/p/C82Ets0uwR3/) earlier this year and without it I might not have recognized this other issue I had with the book - the adherence to the hierarchy of romantic/sexual relationships over friendships, evident in this quote: 

The context is that the author was giving out advice to people who found more rules applied to them by their partner after coming out as bisexual and may not be able to be as close to their friends as they like. The suggestion that friends should just... put up with changes is alarming to say the least. I'm a firm believer in the power of communication and I think any big changes in one's relationships warrant a conversation with the affected partners, romantic/sexual or not.

Part of me wanted to hate read the rest because this book isn't that long; but also, life is too short for this. If you are a fellow bi (bi-llow?) interested in reading some books on bisexuality, do yourself a favour and skip this one. You'll get so much more out of reading any radical work published by Pluto Press, for example.

insert gif of woman eating a tub of ice cream while crying

This book finished me

This was a very difficult read for many reasons. It is very slow-paced and a good list of trigger warnings is sorely needed. All the characters have experienced abuses and traumas and at times reading this feels like going through second-hand traumas. I definitely believe that Indigenous Peoples in this capitalist yt supremacist society have gone through too much and all deserve better, and it's important for non Indigenous folks to read Indigenous stories. But I honestly struggled with the amount of traumas this book had. One of the main POVs was a cop who didn't end up challenging the system and that plus the ending

where the perpetrator of a sexual abuse incident was caught and put in jail

make the book dangerously close to copaganda. Even if the Métis cop character had a very silly and racist partner who proved to be a great example of the uselessness of cops and the justice system.

I picked this up to look at the art but I did not expect to confront the fact that I knew nothing of China's invasion of Tibet and there's a reason why the Dalai Lama is viewed as a terrorist in China. It's the same playbook that colonialist powers use everywhere else, from Turtle Island to South Africa to Palestine.