Kit and Theo, two queer childhood best friends/current exes, accidentally reunite on a whirlwind European culinary vacation and examine how their post-breakup time apart has shaped them as individuals and what this could mean for their respective futures.
I love Casey McQuiston. Their writing style is sharp, witty, and fast-paced. Their dialogue reminds me of a laugh-out-loud comedy show, and the situations they come up for their characters are always entertaining. Red, White, and Royal Blue was my favorite book of theirs for quite a while (it is still a great comfort re-read!) until I read One Last Stop and absolutely fell in love with how unapologetically queer, lightly magical, and found-family-focused it was. I also read their YA novel, I kissed Shara Wheeler and liked the teenager sleepover movie vibes it gave off.
With that being said... this book was just fine. Maybe it was because I expected it to blow my mind like their first two books did, but it just didn't hook me right away like all of their other work has. The first half of the book follows Theo, whose struggles seem to center around jumping to conclusions too quickly and coming from a wealthy family? It made it a bit hard to empathize with them at times. Halfway through the book, we flip to the POV of Kit, which I enjoyed more, but he didn't seem to have many well-developed challenges besides those related to Theo. I like a solid A-B-C set of plots for each main character in a book, and because of the style chosen for this one to flip POVs halfway through and provide snippets of time spent in each city, it didn't seem like Kit's or Theo's B/C plots received enough attention for that. Additionally, most of the conflict in this book was circumstantial, leading to a plot that seemed driven by the characters being very reactionary. Things just kept happening to them, misunderstandings ensued, and if they talked about any of them for even half a second, so many problems would have been solved. I guess I just wanted more substance in this story and to cheer for these characters as much as I did for all the others ones that Casey has created. For most of this read, I was just rolling my eyes.
But the quick dialogue, friendly-fun banter, and lovely descriptions that denote a Casey McQuiston book were all there. The sexy parts were SUPER SEXY this time around. And the descriptions of the food and drink made my mouth water. Two thumbs up there!
This book is a solid 3.5/5 for me. I'm happy I read it and I enjoyed parts of it, but when asked to recommend a Casey McQuiston book to someone, this would be towards the bottom of the list.
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