Hello, bookworms!

Happy Saurday, what are you up to this weekend? After two weekends of travelling back and forth between Milan and Turin, my plans for this one are to do exactly nothing. Later tonight I will be watching the first episode of the final phase of a reality/talent show I watch called Amici di Maria de Filippi, and I cannot wait, since this is my favourite part.

Anyways, today I am back with a Reading the Rainbow article, this time about Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee. As you may or may not remember, back in January I started this series with a review of Sweet & Bitter Magic and I said I didn't want to start with a low rated book, but unfortunately that was a one star read. Apparently, I jinxed myself, because I didn't like Meet Cute Diary either, but I still want to review LGBT+ books, so here we go.

About the book
Title: Meet Cute Diary
Author: Emery Lee
Publisher: Quill Tree Book
Publication date: 4 May 2021
Pages: 391

Plot, as stated on Goodreads
Noah Ramirez thinks he's an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There's just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.

When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah's world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn't have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah's life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah's feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn't quite the same as finding love on the page. In this charming novel by Emery Lee, Noah will have to choose between following his own rules for love or discovering that the most romantic endings are the ones that go off script.

My rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Review
I wasn't sure how to rate this book, because for most of it I was just annoyed and my mind kept saying 'one star read', but I actually liked one of the secondary characters and in the end I vaguely appreciated a bit of the growth Noah seemed to have had.

But let's start from the beginning, or from the most annoying thing of the book: Noah. Noah was an insufferable main character, so entitled and selfish I wanted to slap him. I usually like unlikeable characters, but they have to be well constructed and crafted and Noah simply was not. Maybe it was that the book was written from his point of view and the author didn't seem to aknowledge that Noah was a brat for most of it. Even when his selfishness was addressed in the end, some of it was left out: like, he used tons of his parent's money  for no reason and complained when they froze his credit card and asked him to get a job. I understand that he is a teenager and teenagers are whiney, but what the actual fuck?!

Not only this, but Noah was also stupid. Teenage boys are allowed to make mistakes and be stupid, but he was so blind. This read more like a middle grade than a young adult, and a badly written one at it. I don't know how to explain it, but Noah seemed younger than he was supposed to be and so out of touch from the world, honestly.

Another thing that annoyed the heck out of me was the Meet Cute Diary blog itself: all the stories that were mentioned throughout the book were mlm ftm trans stories; I mean, I get that Noah was writing his own dream meet cutes, but how can a blog like that be followed by so many people and no one has questioned its veridicity up until this point? That sounds pretty unbelievable to me, honestly.

I can suspend my disbelief, when reading a romcom, but I have to like the overall plot of it and the characters; that's like the whole point of romcom: over-the-topness, but coupled with likeable characters and funny situation. This book had none of it, it was just not believable, I didn't care for anyone except for Devin and I didn't find any of it funny. Just totally and deeply annoying.

As I already said, I didn't like Noah as a main character and I didn't find any other characters particularly interesting. Aside from Devin, my little baby did nothing wrong and e deserved so much better than Noah. As did Becca, since Noah was an extremely shitty friend to her. This point in particular was addressed, but I don't think it got the attention or discussion it actually deserved. Friendships and non-romantic relationships were not the best thing about this book, let's just say that.

What I actually enjoyed was the writing style, which was easy to follow and quick to fly through. The book is almost 400 pages long (did it need to be? Probably not, but whatever), but it flew by pretty quickly, thankfully. This is why I am still interested in reading Emery Lee's second book — Café con Lychee, one of my most anticipated releases of the year — because e has the potential, I think, to write a better book. The plot sounds interesting and maybe he had some feedback on the main character of MCD, as I don't think anyone actually liked him, and the MCs of the new book will be better!

So, do I recommend this book? If you don't mind an annoying main character, maybe you could give it a try, as this book has at least neopronouns rep, which is harder to come by in books, I wanna say. Not that there are no other books with characters using neopronouns, but I think you'll agree with me when I say they are not often used in mainstream books. If you have any recs with neopronouns users as main characters, feel free to leave a comment, as I would love to read them and maybe write reviews for them!

That is all for today, have a lovely weekend and I'll talk to you soon with a new article (either a new book tag or the review of Sense and Second-Degree Murder).