#there’s a strongly worded email i still need to write lmfao

[sevenofninehouseofmusiker]

I keep hearing about authors getting rude/passive aggressive comments on things they post to ao3 and like…

1. that’s wild.

2. I guess I haven’t experienced this since my writing is typically read by the same lil circle of folks? It’s just me and my queer echo chamber out here apparently, and I for one am very content with this arrangement.

love y’all 😂💜

[spearfeld]

So I just finished Love, Creekwood

Some spoiler-filled thoughts under the cut!

tl;dr 4/5, it was super cute but I was confused about some things and didn’t think everything worked

Overall, I liked it. It was cute as fuck, and it was nice getting to see the squad again. I have some good to say about it, some bad, and then just some...questions. Let’s start with the good:

Becky’s writing style is as cute and as charming as ever. There were multiple parts of the book that had me laughing out loud, even if maybe not as strongly as I did while reading Simon, Leah, and watching Love Simon and Victor. Drunk Simon makes a reappearance, and it is everything. EVERYTHING. I love that boy so much and he only gets more adorable when he drinks lol.

I love the whole theming of “save states” and wanting to keep moments forever and go back to them, and the idea of holding onto the past. That’s a really unique way of tackling an interesting topic, and I love it quite a bit.

And this isn’t really a bad thing, sort of just an observation, but when Plot Things started happening, it really shocked me, because I forgot that books are supposed to have a plot lmfao. Maybe it is a bit of a criticism, but the reason that surprised me so much is because up until conflict started arising, it really was feeling just like supplemental material, just some cute fluff, the kind of stuff I would go on ao3 to read fanfic about. That’s not necessarily a bad thing--it is very cute and very fluffy and very fun to read--but books do need conflict, even short 100-page novellas told entirely through e-mails.

That being said, the conflict is definitely an interesting one. Long-distance relationship stories are nothing new, of course, but this kind of conflict was teased at the end of Leah on the Offbeat, and I think it’s handled mostly well, narratively. I especially like the contrast between Simon and Bram’s relationship trying to manage long-distance, and Leah and Abby’s who are literally living together and could not be closer if they tried (except Abby does, lol, by suggesting they push their beds together, which, cute).

I’m not entirely sure the e-mail format entirely works for this story. It’s serviceable enough--Becky does a really good job at filling in blanks without spelling everything out for us, with a few exceptions that we’ll get to later--but the e-mails don’t lend themselves to enough character insight, and I found myself getting kind of lost through some of it.

For example, the main “plot” of Love, Creekwood is that Simon and Bram are struggling in their long-distance relationship (did Becky read The Whole Story, should I be pursuing legal action? /s), and that much is apparent through Simon’s e-mails with Bram, but when Simon e-mails Abby and Leah, it seems like he’s worked things out. But then Leah and Abby have their own correspondence where they’re like, “I’m worried about Simon.” And I was like...why? Oh I guess he was trying to make things seem better than they were? Okay, that didn’t super come across in the e-mail. So it was hard to tell what was actually going through the characters’ heads during the story at times. 

But trying to change the story from an e-mail format to a prose format with e-mails like the first Simon book would have taken more time and effort, and I know that Becky probably didn’t want to spend more effort than necessary on a project like this--she’s said on multiple occasions that Leah was the last book in the Simonverse and that she didn’t want to write any more books featuring Simon. I definitely think she was excited about writing this book and getting to spend time with these characters again, but I think digging them up for a full-length novel just wasn’t something she was interested in doing. I can’t blame her for this, either. She spent years in the Simonverse. Simon was her debut, and her next two books were directly related to it in some way--one being a sidestory featuring characters from Simon, and the other being a direct sequel. It’s easy to get burnt out on a world when you spend so much time involved in it, and I think Becky wanted to work on different things. So, for what it’s worth, I think this is probably the best form of this book that we could have gotten.

Also, very tiny nitpick but it was hard to see who was writing who sometimes, since all of the e-mail addresses tended to blur together sometimes, particularly in the group messages, and I think that if Becky wasn’t so dead-set on “e-mails are the thing it has to be e-mails!!” then she could have gotten away with making that an actual group chat/text and it would have read a lot cleaner.

Those are the only real negatives I can say about it, unless you count these questions I have as negatives, which, I kind of count them as half-negatives because they’re not inherently bad things, and I think ambiguity was the intent here, but it left me feeling a bit unsatisfied. Maybe this will change the more I think about the book, but regardles:

What actually happened between Simon and Bram? What’s going on with them? We spend a lot of their e-mails talking about how much they miss each other, and then there’s the whole weird Birthday/Marriage Proposal thing. And we never actually get a concrete answer as to what happened with them on the Ferris wheel. Apparently Simon said two words to Bram that “destroyed” him. And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what those words are supposed to be.

He doesn’t seem to be upset by them, judging by how he wants to “keep that one,” so it has to be a good “destroyed.” But their emails seem to become a lot more strained after that point, and Simon has been neglecting messaging his friends, leaving Leah worried he’s spiraling. What could Simon have said to Bram that night that would change their relationship like that, and cause Simon to retreat the way he did? “Marry me?” “It’s you?” “Fuck Martin?” “Hello, lover?” Like I seriously don’t get what exactly he said there, but I get the impression that I was supposed to have inferred something, that there was something I should have picked up on to lead me to a conclusion, an answer to that question.

Did Simon ask Bram to marry him and he say no? That can’t be, because when Simon finally responds to Leah, he says that, while he does believe Bram is the one, he knows he’s not ready for it to happen right now, so I can’t imagine he would have gone through with proposing. Did he say, “It’s you,” in a callback to when their identities were first revealed? Maybe it’s supposed to be a callback to something from Simon vs that I just don’t remember, because it’s been a while since I’ve reread it.

Going back and rereading that section, it really seems like it’s a one-sided Simon thing at first, that he’s just figuring stuff out. So, if he said “it’s you” what else is there to figure out? Like, they’re still together, they’re spending their breaks together, Simon spends a whole two weeks and then some in New York with Bram, and then they hit that “This isn’t working” point. And so I’m wondering, did something happen when Simon was in New York? It’s never really said, though Abby and Leah do point out Washington Square Park and...I’m not entirely sure why?

Okay, and finally, the ending: I’m still really confused by it. Not Simon transferring to New York, that makes sense, but Bram’s reply to it doesn’t. I mean, it’s in-character and makes sense as his reaction, but I don’t understand it’s significance. What is he calling Simon about? Just, that he’s happy they’re going to be going to school together? To talk about his transfer? I don’t know, something about it just felt incomplete to me.

All of this being said, I did still enjoy this book. It was super cute and exactly the follow-up to this series that I didn’t know I needed haha. Don’t take any of my criticisms of the book as hate or anything. I love Becky, I love her writing style, and I love her characters. This book could have been fifty pages of Simon e-mailing Bram his interpretation of the themes to the Bee Movie and I’d have loved the living hell out of it. It just didn’t click all the right boxes for me, in ways I can’t entirely place my fingers on.