Tl;dr because this got a little long: I'm dropping my rating from 4 stars to unrated because of recent events even though I stand by my enjoyment of the book itself.

So I've kind of been feeling the need to comment on this whole situation, and since I read this book before I made this account, I never actually wrote a review. So here goes.

I want to first and foremost say that Aciman's comments about 12-year-old girls are disgusting and that I will not be buying the sequel or supporting him in any way going forward. Those comments do color the way I view this book now, in retrospect, but I guess I'll get to that.

Reading the book originally, I didn't have an issue with the age gap. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a person in their younger twenties being attracted to someone in their older teens. A lot of the issues with these types of relationships (in my opinion, from watching many, many of my high school friends be in relationships with this kind of age gap) lie in the fact that these two people tend to be in very different places in life. We can see this in the book -- although they spend time together, in the end, they both have to go back to their different, incompatible lives.

I thought the book was prettily written and was an interesting examination of a very intense (to the point of unhealthy dependency and obsession) relationship. It felt like a book about an unhealthy relationship that ended because of the age gap. I didn't think that made it a bad or problematic book. I honestly didn't feel like it was trying to say that the relationship was one you, the reader, should think is healthy.

However, now, because of those previously mentioned comments, I can see how this may not have been Aciman's intention. Age gap romance coming from a man who admitted to pedophilia suddenly feels very different. I stand by my four-star rating of the book -- that's how I felt about it when I read it, that's how I analyzed it. If you ask, I'd say I enjoyed it. We can't always know what the author's intentions are in writing a book. Ratings are, 95% of the time, only about our experience of the book.

However, I will be dropping the star rating on this review and making it unrated, because I do not want to be recommending that anyone support this author anymore. I think you can separate the art and the artist, but not if supporting the art means supporting the artist and the harm they cause.