onceuponanisabel's Reviews (1.48k)

I certainly wouldn't consider myself fluent in Spanish, but I have enough of it that reading Neruda's work in Spanish is a delight. The English translation is good, for the most part, but sometimes there's something about the Spanish that the translator just couldn't capture, and it felt like something hidden there for me.

I didn’t expect to dislike Bloom given how much I loved Heartstopper, but here we are. Mostly, it’s because I found Ari to be impossible to like. He made a lot of bad decisions he never did anything to make up for. Otherwise, the art was pretty, but again, I found other characters similarly impossible to like. Ari’s parents were incredibly frustrating, Hector’s friends were annoying, and Ari’s continued association with an asshole never really felt resolved. Idk, I guess I just disliked pretty much all the characters so much that I could never feel like I liked the book.

Overall, I'd say this book was very solid. I liked the main characters, their chemistry was good, the plot was good and interesting and funny at times and very serious at times. To be honest, this is really the type of book I generally probably would have just rated 4 stars and left it without writing a whole review, just because I don't have all that much to say about most of it. However, I have an issue with this book (and many books, but this one is kind of the last straw) and I feel the need to rant about it. And yes, it's why my rating has been knocked down to 3 stars.

There's a bit of a trend in which authors of contemporary/romance novels dwell entirely too much on a woman's body in a very specific way. These characters belittle themselves, they are belittled by other side characters (this generally serves as a cue that we should dislike these side characters) and their love interest is Such A Good Person because they are attracted to this (and I feel like it's important to note -- thin) woman. I'm so, so tired of it. If you aren't going to legitimately discuss insecurity and body shaming, I don't want it. All it does is needlessly include cruelty into your book.

I've rarely been someone to go against the grain of popular opinion with books (and movies, and tv, and anything else). When I saw someone on Twitter raving about this book and how highly it had been rated by early reviewers, I was excited to request a copy. I assumed I would love it too (like I usually do). It sucks to have to report back differently.

So what is Tweet Cute about?

Pepper and Jack are high school students juggling college apps, anonymous relationships on a school app, swim team, and their parents' sandwich shops (Pepper's family's fast food chain and Jack's family's local deli). When the two restaurants get into a bit of an online tiff over a copied grilled cheese recipe, the two teens take over their respective companies' Twitter accounts for a feud that was made for viral fame.

My thoughts:

Generally speaking, I should have liked this book. The second star is awarded for being a genuinely adorable contemporary romance. The characters felt realistic. The relationships between friends and family members were believable and enjoyable. The kinds of criticisms I generally have for contemporaries like this one don't apply. And yet, I struggled to get through this and I found myself ranting about it to my roommate just to get how frustrated I was off my chest.

As you can tell from any of the summaries (or actually from the title itself), this book centers around social media. This kind of focus is risky. I'm sure you've heard lots of discussion about pop culture references in books -- how they date the story and how they can feel like a cheap grasp for relatability. "This book references Mean Girls??? I've seen that!" (Also, by the way, this book references Mean Girls and Gossip Girl about a million times each. I feel like I might have been a bit less annoyed if there was any semblance of variability.) Tweet Cute was absolutely packed with pop culture references, but somehow even worse than that are the meme references. If you think pop culture references date this book (which they do, to the mid to late 2010's) oh boy, do memes date a book so much more (specifically to spring 2018, somehow. I'm assuming that's about when the bulk of this book was written).

Besides the incessant pop culture references driving me insane, the technospeak was just...wrong. You absolutely cannot write a book that is as much about social media as this book is without making sure that all of your social media content is at least correct. It was all little things that may well be caught in editing before this book is released, but calling a drama channel a vlog channel, calling it "quote retweeting", or remarking that a viral Twitter war left one account with "over a hundred notifications" eats away at your credibility to be writing a book like this. These are just three examples of the many that made me want to quit reading.

A book like this should have been one I could get through in one evening, but I got so frustrated that I had to repeatedly set it down and walk away. It sucks, because this is a book that I could have so easily loved. It has tropes I enjoy, characters I found likable, and no plot difficulties that I couldn't overlook. I think overall, I just found it pretty difficult to read a book about two teens spending a lot of time on social media by someone who just isn't quite fluent enough in technospeak to pull it off.

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley

Uh yeah. Things I hate:

1) Getting back together bc of a grand gesture instead of good communication.
2) grand gestures in public.
3) public proposals (see above)
4) trying to get your ex-girlfriend back by proposing to her in public via a grand gesture rather than utilizing healthy communication.

This might have been three stars (oh, the cringe) but that ending absolutely ruined it for me.

My sister and I have been working on collecting the dark horse Buffy comics, so I got this giant book for her birthday (and of course read it myself) and I loved the variety of art styles and all of the little vignettes set in the Buffy universe.