#The app thing was weird. it feels very blatantly like a plot was devised and then they made up an app to make the plot work. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aroaessidhe · 2 months ago

Text

2024 reads / storygraph

Thanks For Listening

YA contemporary

a girl who’s the stage manager in her high school theater club is tired of nobody listening to her advice, so she makes an anonymous social media account that people might actually listen to

while also dating her first girlfriend and struggling with her relationship with her best friends

ace MC

#thanks for listening #aroaessidhe 2024 reads #this was…..not good. full of nonsensical drama and somehow nothing happens #okay I feel like I knew a couple pages in that this wasn’t gonna be great; but I kept going because it’s short.#The entire book felt like a plot outline that was awkwardly filled in with things that barely made sense #The main romance - they literally meet and talk for five minutes when she asks her on a date #we see the date and a handful of initial conversations then it’s almost entirely off page? no build up and no genuine development.#There’s some cute surface level moments but it kinda felt like the relationship was just a vessel for mia to talk about her asexuality.#a lot of that also felt surface level to me though. if it were in the middle of a plot with depth it might have worked but since it wasn't.#Also. the LI kisses her on their first date in the middle of a conversation [and she freaks out as she’s never been kissed nor even likes i #at that point] and the LI doesn’t even like vaguely apologise or express any kind of oh whoops….#like obviously characters don’t need to act like therapists etc etc but like.#is the author even conscious of the fact that kissing someone without warning could be not great!#It felt very much like a plot point written in for plot without all of its implications being considered.#There’s also the random drama of the girlfriend having a supposed sex curse and then this ‘she’s using you to keep an abstinence bet'#thing which are……honestly completely irrelevant to their relationship; I’m glad it didn’t create drama there #but also why was it even there in the first place other than just to be a reason for her friends to be shitty to her about it for the plot.#it was so odd #her relationships with her friends are barely developed either. Like maybe that’s the point; that they’re not great friends and ignore her #but I just felt like there was no established reason for me to care about that? Them apologising and making up at the end #felt hollow because like……I don’t care. Also this is probably on me but I didn’t realise one of them was a boy til half way through #the book. so you can see how much of an impact they made #The app thing was weird. it feels very blatantly like a plot was devised and then they made up an app to make the plot work.#but the thing is it’s not believable? like idk people don’t interact with social media like that #also. her getting her techie cousin to hack the app to make it show her classmates her videos shfshfdh what??#felt like a very awkward way to try fill a plot hole or something. just make it by location….#also: the app is called reellife. and she mentions the booktok community on it. it wouldn’t be called booktok if it’s not on tiktok lmao!#overall it just is lacking depth and felt like a bunch of disconnected elements…… somehow every single plot felt like a subplot.#I know this is YA and I am not a teenager but there are a lot of Actually Good YA books.#Also I just read Here Goes Nothing which has similar elements and was better.

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