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shealea 's review for:
Not the Girls You're Looking for
by Aminah Mae Safi
This is easily one of the most difficult book reviews I’ve ever had to write because I have plenty of mixed feelings about Not the Girls You’re Looking For that make expressing my opinion just a tad more complicated.
While I eventually learned to appreciate many aspects of this story, its beginning was rough, slow, and oftentimes confusing and this continued to drag on for a significant portion of the whole book. There was a lot of weirdly written dialogue that showed no direction and came across as unnatural, making it difficult for me to follow and to understand what was happening.
Speaking of, I don’t think anything was actually happening in the first part of the book. The opening half of Not the Girls You’re Looking For was littered with mundane, directionless scenes that collectively did not constitute an observable plot. The experience felt like watching fish swim in an aquarium; that is, I was introduced to a group of friends and had to read about them navigating through their everyday lives in their natural habitats, but nothing about their lives or their environments was engaging at all.
It was around 54% of the book that Not the Girls You’re Looking For started becoming more interesting and more bearable. The sudden one-eighty turn that the story took on definitely made up for the incredibly weak and frustrating first half. For one thing, the storyline began to move along at a faster, more compelling pace, and as events progressed, it became clearer to me what ideas the story was trying to tackle. In line with this, the unlikely female friendships were developed more dimensionally, and by the end of it all, I was actively cheering for Lulu and her friends.
Overall, I have an incredibly turbulent hate-to-love relationship with this novel. My reading experience was filled with an extensive range of strong emotions that was easily spurred on by Aminah Mae Safi’s effectively evocative writing style. There was a lot of beauty held within eloquent passages, but at the same time, the author was blatantly unafraid to show the uglier, crueler, and upsetting side of things. In doing so, socially relevant messages about existing inequalities and realities were effectively broadcast, as well as important themes of love, friendship, and learning from mistakes. Not the Girls You’re Looking For was definitely an unforgettable read: unapologetically messy, hauntingly real, brilliantly snarky, but ultimately, poignant and timeless.
Disclosure: I received a digital ARC of Not the Girls You’re Looking For (via NetGalley) as part of my participation in a blog tour. This neither affects my opinion nor the content of my review. Thank you very much to the blog tour organizer (Aimee @ Aimee, Always) as well as the publisher for the opportunity!
While I eventually learned to appreciate many aspects of this story, its beginning was rough, slow, and oftentimes confusing and this continued to drag on for a significant portion of the whole book. There was a lot of weirdly written dialogue that showed no direction and came across as unnatural, making it difficult for me to follow and to understand what was happening.
Speaking of, I don’t think anything was actually happening in the first part of the book. The opening half of Not the Girls You’re Looking For was littered with mundane, directionless scenes that collectively did not constitute an observable plot. The experience felt like watching fish swim in an aquarium; that is, I was introduced to a group of friends and had to read about them navigating through their everyday lives in their natural habitats, but nothing about their lives or their environments was engaging at all.
It was around 54% of the book that Not the Girls You’re Looking For started becoming more interesting and more bearable. The sudden one-eighty turn that the story took on definitely made up for the incredibly weak and frustrating first half. For one thing, the storyline began to move along at a faster, more compelling pace, and as events progressed, it became clearer to me what ideas the story was trying to tackle. In line with this, the unlikely female friendships were developed more dimensionally, and by the end of it all, I was actively cheering for Lulu and her friends.
Overall, I have an incredibly turbulent hate-to-love relationship with this novel. My reading experience was filled with an extensive range of strong emotions that was easily spurred on by Aminah Mae Safi’s effectively evocative writing style. There was a lot of beauty held within eloquent passages, but at the same time, the author was blatantly unafraid to show the uglier, crueler, and upsetting side of things. In doing so, socially relevant messages about existing inequalities and realities were effectively broadcast, as well as important themes of love, friendship, and learning from mistakes. Not the Girls You’re Looking For was definitely an unforgettable read: unapologetically messy, hauntingly real, brilliantly snarky, but ultimately, poignant and timeless.
Disclosure: I received a digital ARC of Not the Girls You’re Looking For (via NetGalley) as part of my participation in a blog tour. This neither affects my opinion nor the content of my review. Thank you very much to the blog tour organizer (Aimee @ Aimee, Always) as well as the publisher for the opportunity!