I read this one because I'm an absolute sucker for any book that's bold enough to put tank tops on the cover, and also because it's 2020 and there was Discourse(TM) about it apparently using the harmful 'gay for you' trope and I wanted to get enraged to distract myself from the terrible pain in my womb. Imagine my disappointment when it actually quite clearly had both protagonists reassess their sexuality about halfway through the book, with one of them actively exploring bi and pan identities and starting to identify as bisexual, using the dreaded B word itself, and the other one sort of settling on 'not straight, but who knows? Not me, and that's fine.' As someone who oscillates between those two camps myself, I wasn't mad at it.

This book had many things to get enraged about, including an unintentionally hilarious scene where someone picks up a severed arm and several mentions of people sharing a toothbrush before marriage, which should frankly be punishable by death, but it also had some of the best dialogue in any book I've read this year, which frankly I wasn't expecting from a book with two men in tank tops on the cover. The characterisation was consistent, the plot was interesting to me, as a person who reads more books about plane crashes and mountaineering disasters than is probably psychologically healthy, and there were several plotlines running through that were all tied up neatly, including one which I can only assume is based on Air Canada Flight 797 (look, I really do read a lot about plane crashes) and a really well-drawn narrative of inherited trauma and addiction. Much like Shrek, this book has layers.

Is it a clearly ridiculous book? I mean, yes; one of them is called Troy and the other one is called Brian, and they crash on a desert island and fall in love. Is it also incredibly enjoyable? Was I pleasantly surprised at the emotional nuance? Did I stay up until 2am to read it in one sitting? The answer to all of these is also yes, and I'm only half as ashamed of that as I should be. Instead of finding myself enraged, I actually found it a relatively decent depiction of two people realising later on in life (at the haggard ages of 26 and 39) that they were something other than straight, and I'm not sure it fits the 'gay for you' trope at all; more like 'straight before you.'

I did feel a bit like getting enraged at the amount of times the word 'hole' was used, but maybe that's my problem.