Hello and happy Monday. If you saw what I posted yesterday and you’re kind of confused, here’s your context: yesterday I finished reading An Upper West Side Story by Rachel Cullen and I wanted to share with you some horrible quotes because there were so many that I couldn’t organically include them all in my review. I posted the quotes before the review because I finished reading at around 5pm or so and I didn’t feel like writing something that required much thought on my part. I do want to thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This a bad book that people shouldn’t be reading. It is so casual about fatphobia, disordered eating, misogyny and altogether shit that shouldn’t be casually thrown out in novels without any sort of commentary or challenge or critical analysis that I thought about DNFing it at least five times. My experience reading this wasn’t pleasant at all, and it isn’t only because the characters were shitty and I feel like the author used them as a shield to project her own shitty ideas without the backlash. Well, I saw through it.

This novel is set in 2004, which I found absolutely pointless plot-wise, but I think the author chose this year for two reasons: 1) I think she was in her mid-twenties in 2004, so she was the characters’ age, which means she didn’t have to do much research because she could’ve drawn from her own experience. That’s smart, I’ll hand her that. However, 2) I think that the novel is set in 2004 because the author wanted to have an excuse to write horrible characters and reproduce ideas that we now generally understand that are violent and shouldn’t be accepted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author thought or said something along the lines of “If this were set in 2023, it would be cancelled.” And yes, it should because I don’t think any amount of editing or sensitivity reading would make this an okay novel.

Now, aside from the structural issues, this was poorly written. I don’t know how many sentences I read in which the same word was used twice or more for no apparent reason other than to show that the author was in need of a thesaurus. The plot itself was all over the place; we had four main characters, three of whom were women, and although we don’t get detailed descriptions of them, it’s clear that they’re all white, skinny and either blonde or brunette. They were interchangeable, really, and painfully unrelatable.

This story is supposed to be set in New York City, right? Well, there wasn’t one character who was explicitly written as anything other than white…there wasn’t even a Jewish character. (There was a character who appropriated some Yiddish terms, which was really odd to read, considering that there were Yiddish words that I grew up with that I was so used to listening that I thought they were actually in Spanish). Even Gossip Girl had more diversity than this book. There was a character who “liked women,” and she was written this way basically as a way to ensure that she wasn’t going to compete with her best friend for the attention of men. And even then, at one point the best friend suspects that the queer character is sleeping with her boyfriend. Talk about a feminist novel.

To wrap this up, and hopefully to provide a final argument for you to read another book, I think that the author wanted to write this as a sitcom, so think Friends in the form of a novel. It wouldn’t have worked as a sitcom either, at least not for me because we were given so little about the characters and their relationships with each other that it was meant to be a forgettable piece in any format. Save your precious time and pick something else to read.