rickjones's Reviews (1.66k)

This was a very odd book... I almost am not sure what I think of it? There wasn't a clear plot until the last third of the book, so I had difficulty continuing it because the characters were off-putting to me and not strong enough to lead the story alone. Raine is excessively quirky, a Jewish convert disinterestedly attending Catholic school, who romanticizes the Holocaust to the point of disrespect. She is both entitled and an activist who protests issues others tell her to just ignore. She was raised by an Indigenous woman her family employs, and romanticizes her culture too, while never making attempts to understand the imbalance of power between them. She repeatedly goes on stream of consciousness monologues, and is both anxious and aloof. If not for her entitlement I may have liked her more, but her ignorance and irresponsibility was painful to read at times.

Al is even less developed as a character, he is moody and anxious about his marriage, though he makes few attempts to improve it. He starts the book interested in Raine while simultaneously annoyed with her, yet he eventually develops a sort of infatuation with her that he struggles to explain to others or himself. At times, this dynamic between them was uneasy, though Al does not seem to have romantic or predatory feelings towards Raine. He grows to respect and want to protect her, which quickly becomes necessary. 

Though I was disinterested in most of the book, I really appreciated the final lines, "she was a confused kid with some cockeyed ideas. She said a lot of crazy, jangling things, but she made him feel serene. Society was suspicious of him- yet all suspicion withered in the strength of his feelings, as all false things must. The world was full of falsities. But Raine was a true thing". This passage summed up the book beautifully, and finally made clear what Hurley was trying to represent with her characters. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to others. If you like quirky characters and inter-generational friendships it might be something you enjoy. However, it handled ethnocultural issues strangely and often felt winding, without a point, until the final pages.

I really did try to like this book, yet Noah has to be the most unlikeable and entitled teenage protagonist I've encountered in young adult literature so far, and his character development was far too weak to make up for how selfishly he behaved throughout the story.

First of all, I take serious issue with Noah feeling that his serial lying on the Meet Cute Diary is the only thing standing in the way of some trans teenagers killing themselves. I had assumed that we would learn that Noah got in over his head with the Diary to explain why he felt it was appropriate to lie to so many people for attention, yet instead he seems to feel no guilt for being dishonest for popularity and justifies his decision to waste his parents' money to seek out more strangers to romanticize fake relationships with because "trans kids may lose hope and kill themselves if I don't continue placating them with an endless series of lies". His eventual apology to his followers was not nearly enough to make up for his self-absorbed behavior in my opinion. If he had actually wanted to help other trans people he would have asked for them to submit their own stories from the beginning instead of presenting them with poorly written fantasies to serve his own ego and further delude himself that his dishonesty was needed so desperately that the situation was life or death.

To make matters worse, Noah likens his role as the writer of this blog to a situation where a transgender girl he did not know in high school inspired him to discover he was trans after he heard that she was bullied so severely that she attempted suicide. Perhaps predictably,

this same transgender girl, who now identifies as nonbinary and uses e / em pronouns, becomes Noah's endgame love interest.

Yet e's history as a survivor of a suicide attempt and vicious harassment is only discussed briefly in its application to Noah's life, which I find deplorable. Suicidal trans teenagers deserve more than to be "inspiration" or an excuse for why an egotistical character feels no remorse for doing something that is ultimately self-serving. I also find it interesting how Noah's "trolls" are presented as anonymous haters with un-explored motivations when they were right about his blog to begin with and have a reason to be angry with him. Why would anyone thinking critically about this scenario not agree that Noah was undeserving of the endless praise being sent his way?

I don't even want to bother fully reviewing other elements of the book, because I don't see the point. Why create a character this selfish and manipulative to begin with if you don't intend to confront his actions? Noah's behavior just put me in a foul mood whenever I was reading about him, and I only stuck around because I was hoping he would grow up. Unfortunately these hopes were not met. It is not uncommon for young adult literature to contain self-absorbed protagonists, yet these characters generally learn that their attitudes and behaviors are unacceptable to continue if they want to mature as people and develop relationships that are lasting and not toxic. This did not happen with Noah. 

Noah never had to seriously reevaluate why he felt so secure being manipulative and egotistical because every character exists in this book to serve Noah. Their identities revolve around Noah. Even when they were said to be upset with Noah they forgave his half-hearted apologies because they are useless to the narrative when not there to bolster Noah's self esteem. This applies to every character in the book, even Noah's parents. Worst of all for a romance book, the end romance did not feel genuine because it was manufactured to be perfect for Noah, a person who remained too immature and self-serving to healthily participate in any romantic relationship. This book is a shadow of what it could have been if the author had been willing to put Noah into scenarios where forgiveness was not so easily given, and worked to make the supporting characters less one-dimensional. I believe that teenage readers are intelligent enough that they should not be asked to relate to a protagonist this shallow. I am angry with this book now and I would have been angry with it when I was sixteen. It is insulting to the very people it intends to uplift.

I love to see trans authors flourishing, so despite my frustrations with this book I will keep an open mind for Lee's next title. However, I would not recommend Meet Cute Diary to anyone but the most desperate seekers of trans representation. Trans identity is not the forefront of this book, which is not an inherent flaw, yet the book's focus is reserved for deceit, egomaniacal behavior, and poorly developed romances. I wish I had never read it to begin with. I feel nothing but manipulated and diminished by the story it held.

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a magical tale of a cursed childhood, which begins and ends as a horror story about the theft of bodily autonomy. While this book is an engaging read, the subject matter also made it a taxing one. By the end of the book I felt almost angry that I had stayed with the Fortuna women so long only to never see them vindicated. Yet our ability to read this story is a vindication in itself. As readers, we grant Stella what she as spent her entire life searching for: understanding, empathy and shared rage.

While this story is fictional, it is written with so much detail and winding family mythologies that it feels real. My favorite part of the book was imagining Stella's nature-rich and independent life in Ievoli, but I felt the chapters about her young adulthood dragged on to the point of frustration, and the story of her adulthood was surprisingly brief. However, this briefness may have been an intentional decision to illustrate her loss of passion for life. I don't doubt that there are many women who lived pieces of Stella's story, and intimately know its pain. The Fortuna women were courageous, capable characters with varied strengths. Yet the world reduced them to property of their fathers and husbands, a fate which Stella desperately tried to escape but had no means to. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to others. While it is a beautifully written and honest portrait of Stella the survivor, her adulthood is so dismal that I questioned why I was putting myself through envisioning these moments in her life at all. I leave the book wondering "What was the point?" Yet as Grames states through her narrator, "of course there never is any point, but until you think that thought for the first time it doesn’t matter that there isn’t".