My write-up for this book is going to be scattered because it has been constructed from a bunch of random thoughts and jokes that I scribbled in my journal while reading. I’m not going for peak literary criticism here. 

 

As much as I liked this book, there was something about it that was holding me back from giving it a higher personal rating. I really can’t put my finger on what it is. August and Jane’s relationship is very cute, but if I’m being very honest, I enjoyed the way Jane was written exponentially more. When all the shit went down with August’s mom and her parents and the money, I found myself not caring. At all. 

 

Less than a chapter into the book and I could tell that McQusiton not only lives in New York but has a deep understanding of the city. It got to a point where I was going to pull an armchair Sex in the City fan and say that the TRUE main character was the city of New York. And that makes me wonder where this depth of set establishment was in RWRB. 

 

McQuiston also has a very weird habit of writing all the side characters with more interesting backstories and personalities than the main character. On multiple occasions I found myself flipping through the Jane/August scenes trying to figure out when Nyla, Wes, and Niko were going to show up again. Even though Nyla was basically a mouthpiece for every meme or AAVE grammar point McQuiston thought was funny, she was still a lot of fun to read. 

 

McQuiston thinks she can get out of the “main character moves to NYC and is a journalist” rom-com trope by making August a modern-day Sherlock Holmes with a sociology degree. How very liberal arts of her. But August is basically doing journalism work with more steps, so I’m counting it. Sorry, Casey, you lose. They even made a Jessica Jones joke I CAN’T— 

 

This book really had me going on the contemporary urban fantasy… until you had two women fucking in a New York City subway car. Now Casey, bestie, I know your ass was high as a kite when you thought of that because there is NO WAY! I don’t care if they’re lesbians, diseases and infections are rated E for everyone, and you could not pay me any amount of money to get fingered on the NYC subway. 

 

Shout out to my boy Wes who made several points in this book. We always need kings like him.