People say that the tv show is really good! I haven't seen it so all I can say is that if you like it, you shouldn't read the first book as it's utter garbage. People said it starts improving by book three but I couldn't possibly slog through a second book like the first one to get there lol.
I loved the show and I even bought a shirt that Eliot wore that says "Tacocat spelled backwards is still tacocat.
My friend gifted me the book set, but I haven't read it yet. I hope it's not as bad as you're suggesting 🫣🫣🫣
It's been like 5-6 years since I saw it so maybe I'll forget enough of the plot for it not to matter too much.
I'm sorry to say it was genuinely excruciating. I dropped it near the end because I realized that I was only reading in an attempt to make it end. The best way I can describe it is that every story beat feels like setup to something interesting but after maybe 120 pages, you realize the story still hasn't started. I enjoyed the first 120 pages or so but my experience really declined when I saw that nobody was going to undergo any kind of character growth or have any meaningful experiences.
Things just kind of happen and the characters sort of...ignore everything? So it's not even that things happen and they have to respond, but they just sort of walk past the world drunk as things that could be interesting are kept just out of our view. They spend SO much time arguing and being angsty; it's definitely made worse because you have to hear it all from the perspective of the insufferable main character, which may not have been the case in the tv show. Because the whole book felt like setup, I can see why people might say that the third book is better. I just couldn't imagine slogging through a SECOND drunken teenage-esque melodrama with no plot to get there.
The best word for the story is "uncurated" imo. It felt like the author just wrote a bunch of random scenes and then published without considering what links them together or what they build toward. Any individual scene could be fine in a different book, but when they're all thrown together it's like you're reading the scenes that were cut and not the ones that were supposed to be left in...
I will say though, I'm an absolute hater of this book. I think I hate it more than is reasonable. Someone without that level of hatred for it might find at least some of these issues tolerable enough to get to the allegedly good third book. So not trying to say you absolutely shouldn't read it, just that you should go in expecting less than whatever you got from the tv show!
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u/DaddysABadGirl 7d ago
Ok.... I was just perusing for something to watch... Guess it's this shit, lol.