marriage of convenience should be aggravating but sexy. this is only aggravating.

an age gap featuring a ballet dancer shouldn't be this boring, and im not feeling the connection the characters swear they have (their insta love/attraction seems forced to me).

dnf @ 27%

i thought myself in the mood for mary oliver's obsession with nature, but i guess i underestimated the size of this collection. the woman didn't care about form whatsoever, making her platitudes completely unimpressive, except for some verses here and there. someone said most of her poems are just diary entries with line breaks, and that pretty much sums it up. 

on hold @ 21%

I was ready to procrastinate so many tasks for this book, but it's just not giving me what it should be giving me, like distinctive narration voices, for instance. and one of the mc's just did something I despise: deliberately chose not to tell the other their little paradise was being watched. in the fucking apocalypse. would it have changed much in their current situation if he hadn't kept info to himself? probably not, but I hate convenient dumb shit like this. also, as a brazilian, I'm not getting/caring for half of the jokes/references, so there's that. 

***

reading update @ 10% 

was watching The Last of Us ep3 and remembered I had an apocalypse book on my romance tbr. it's literally that episode but ya, and instead of a grumpy-sunshine couple there's a oblivious-outgoing type of duo? and no zombies, just a new covid. the writing is solid for a debut book, but I'm not sure if it will be enough in the long run: the setup seems a little too easy. and unfortunately I do have a thing called job, so maybe I shouldn't focus on finishing both the book and the show this week anyway.

depois de ler e amar uma childhood enemies to lovers que achei no kindle unlimited, fiquei necessitada de algo semelhante, aquela mistura perigosa de angst, vingança e smut. não precisei procurar muito, pois Try Me ja estava na minha tbr. não tinha esperanças de ser uma enemies to lovers de vdd (romances contemporâneos quase nunca são) e o começo foi promissor. o problema é que agora nem como rivais com um orgulho a ser ferido os protagonistas estão agindo, e não tenho tempo pra isso.

too self indulgent even by my standards 

on hold @ 30% 

not the "let's pretend it never happened" dialogue after a whole night of flirting (and after hours of me waiting for the actual romance to start). i also wanna add that it isn't realistic at all two very distant work colleagues who talked only once two years ago in a professional meeting exchanging messages as if they've been bickering since then or as if their first meeting happened the week before (see how i didn't complain about the rivals-to-lovers not having any real rivalry? im learning, contemporary romance authors, im learning). i was willing to ignore all that before the denial between two consenting adults took place, and because i picked this up mainly for its meta quality/book world setting (same reason why i've read Beach Read, and that book let me down in both departments); but if the mc's kissed like that already and agreed to pretend it never happened right after, that means the family drama will take even more space to prolong the story and their stay in the dead small town, which, even with all its meta irony, is NOT the book world setting i was hoping for. a shame, considering how much i liked and related to the prologue.

on hold @ 37%
 
even though this is a contemporary romance, i found myself pretty excited to read it, as the premise is right up my alley: a grumpy boss/sunny PA romance where the boss is a creator of a famous m/m-coded tv show called Leeches and his assistant is a fanfic writer widely known in the Leeches' fandom. add to this mix a small age gap and you have a contemporary romance that's actually good... or maybe not. nothing about the development is clicking for me: not Lewis' manchild attitude, not the british setting, not the boring work travel. nothing besides the story-about-a-story premise. on top of that, the author throws a time jump in their relationship right away. it's a weird case of telling-not-showing. i keep thinking if this book were a fanfic of my favorite ship in bts i would like it better, bc only repeating how hot and brilliant a person is doesn't do much for me. and there's this mystery, about why Lewis is allergic to relationships and disrespectfully honest, that i bet once revealed won't manage to make me feel exactly sympathetic towards him. don't get me wrong, i love a damaged, internally vulnerable, emotionally constipated hero, but The Hating Game traumatized me and now i can't trust romance authors to do the bare minimum, which is: to give their characters plausible reasons to be the way they are.

it should be illegal to write bad hate-to-love stories. at least this book made me realize i don't enjoy my characters having sex before real feelings come to play. peak enemies-to-lovers is when two people hate each other so much that, in order to accept they want each other, they have to rebuild themselves and their conceptions of one another. the couple here doesn't scratch even the surface of that since their mutual hate is motivated by douche and teenager behavior only. you see, i don't need and most of the times i don't even like ethical reasons, but i really need a good one. if at least seyn wasn't so ridiculously reactive to ksar's cruel words their fights wouldn't have felt so gratuitous and impersonal, but there was no real defiance besides cursing, scowling and public flirtation. i couldn't see how they would redeem themselves, fall in love and start to have some chemistry, to the point that, instead of rooting for them, i was fully invested in seyn's goal of breaking their bond, which i don't think it was the effect intended by the author. anyways, ksar's cold persona isn't sexy bc he really is a cold jerk Lol there seems to be nothing more about him and his future husband, so good riddance to both of them.

dnf @ 27%

in my review of the first book in this austen retellings series i said i wouldn't continue with it bc i didn't like the secondary characters. however, some days ago i found out that the mansfield park book featured new ones and had sort of a forbidden romance just like the emma retelling. so i picked it up and here we are. besides the lazy writing and unconvincing time jumps, this book reminded me a lot of Rock, which – surprise, surprise – i also dnfed last year and only now realized is by the same author Lol you see, i appreciate a little angst in my romances, but i don't vibe with unnecessary drama mixed with a shallow relationship in which one of the characters does dumb shit while the other suffers for them both. and that's what i felt these two books were going to be about before i came to my senses and decided to sleep instead of reading.