I finally finished the book I’d been reading for weeks, and now I can write a proper review about it. Last night I finished The Careful Undressing of Love by Corey Ann Haydu and I honestly never expected to not like the book. Did that sentence make any sense? I always thought I’d at least like this novel, but I can’t lie to myself, and I could lie to you, but I won’t. This just wasn’t the book for me.

Lorna, our main character, is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in a street in Brooklyn that is said to be cursed. What’s the curse about? Well, if you’re a woman and you’ve lived in Devonairre Street for over a year and you fall in love with a man, he will die. I’m not going to talk about how heteropatriarchal it all seems or how diversity in gender identity and/or sexual orientation might come into play. I can understand that for the author to build this cursed street she felt like she had to oversimplify. Do I agree with that oversimplification? No, but that wasn’t a huge issue and it was actually a secondary reason as to why I didn’t like the book.

There is a group of Devonaire Street kids, of which Lorna is a part, and they’re best friends and inseparable, and they don’t believe in the curse. That seems to be the foundation of their bond, other than the fact that they grew up together, and that their fathers are dead. I didn’t feel like their relationship was strong, though, but that could be because the book was mostly focused on Lorna. She was an unlikable character, or at least to me she read unlikable. Was that why I didn’t like the book? Again, no. I don’t mind unlikable characters if the story is well-constructed, and this was.

What really made me not like this story, and it is totally subjective and personal, is the fact that I thought that it would be whimsical, and magical, and all this things that it wasn’t. Yes, there’s a curse, but there’s no magic, there aren’t any blessings. I thought I was going into a happier story, a more hopeful one, but I didn’t, which made me struggle with it. Like I said, this was totally subjective and you might love it, but I’m past my cynical phase in life.

Based on this review, what kind of book do you think I’d enjoy?