Dear Wendy

this glorified wellesley fanfic was mildly entertaining (as someone who also went to a massachusetts historically women's college, but a generation ago, while we were still having the same conversations about gender and sexuality but a little before they were called “historically” women's colleges) but not anything mind-blowing. i was honestly ready to give up about a third of the way through because sophie and jo's juvenile (literally; felt like i was witnessing junior high schoolers, not college first-years) online feud was so exhausting to read, and it felt like it went on forever. i also listened a little bit to the audiobook and i think that didn't help my impression of sophie being mad annoying/holier-than-thou. eventually her friends tell her to get over herself and she somewhat improves, though, so thank you side characters, even if your personalities all kind of melded into one amorphous sounding board.

as for the aroace stuff: it was sometimes hard to tell what was like, a character's fear of abandonment or personal insecurity or past hangup versus part of a particular identity-related struggle, if that makes sense. not that they have to be particularly distinct from one another, but i also don't know if i was left with a particularly strong impression of aromanticism, or even why/how our protagonists liked each other intensely enough for things to fall somewhere beyond friendship. they were completely unnecessarily petty and obsessively mean online, but upon the inevitable reveal, the focus just narrowed down to “you didn't tell me your secret identity and that's why i'm mad”? huh??

ps. it doesn't exactly spoil anything, but ann zhao really went ahead and casually described the final scene in alice wu's last movie just like that, lol.

pps. i've been removed from it for quite a while now but reading this book just reminded me (not in a good way) how insular small liberal arts college subculture (and hyperlocalized queer communities) can be. i worked in a higher ed setting for a while after uni. it's just the same old stuff!