Too many personal anecdotes from the author. Was hoping for more history of the bars themselves

This book didn't work for me on multiple levels. The writing felt too cartoonish, the characters (except for Nelson) felt like caricatures or they were boring, TJ Klune takes forever to make a point, and every quote that was meant to feel "meaningful" came across as shallow. 
I think my biggest frustration is that I wanted this book to be more of an introspective, character-driven novel featuring Wallace grappling with what went wrong in his life through flashbacks. The one scene that worked for me was when he drank the peppermint tea and went back to his childhood, and I wish we had more of that. Without looking at Wallace's back story, we have no idea why he became the curmudgeonly lawyer he came to be, which makes the potential of his redemption feel false. Instead of emotional labor conducted by Wallace, we have a KoOkY cast of characters that are supposed to become his found family, and I don't think Klune was successful in crafting this trope. 
I will say, kudos to the audiobook narrator, he really gave it his all.

Objectively this book is well-written; however, I didn’t mesh with it. It was super detail-oriented and yet the action and the characters felt so far removed from me that I didn’t really care what was going on.

I think that Chelsea Manning’s story is hugely important and I would love to research more into her life and look up any author events/podcasts she may have done. However, the actual writing in this book was very dry and did not compel me to keep going. She spends a lot of time discussing the minutiae of the military, which personally did not interest me very much.

Could not get invested in the story

There was nothing inherently wrong with this book - in fact, it was incredibly well-written. However, I had a hard time staying with it and couldn’t see myself returning to it anytime soon.

I could tell pretty early on I wasn’t going to be a fan of the narrative style, so I saved myself the torture of continuing this book.
Also, the overall premise (man runs into classmate he hasn’t seen in 20 years and tells him HIS ENTIRE LIFE STORY) was wildly unrealistic and took me out of enjoying the story.

I’m so disappointed, I wanted to like this so bad but I could not get into it. I had a similar issue with this one as I did with One Last Stop where I couldn’t connect with the main character, which made it difficult for me to pick up the book.

Could not connect with the writing style at all - too terse and choppy and entirely devoid of lyricism

Not really in the mood to keep going with this right now. Maybe I’ll return to it later