Technically, You Started It

So the biggest reason for my recent hiatus was that I was having trouble reading. If I can't read, I can't review! And every time I tried to read a book, I fell asleep. I just couldn't pay attention to pages of text. I knew, however, that this book had a demisexual protagonist, and I thought that might be enough to keep my attention. I opened the book, and found that the entire thing was written in text message format with speech bubbles, instead of giant blocks of text. Which was EXACTLY what I needed to hold my interest!

This is a precious book, told entirely via text messages between Haley, a demisexual girl, and Martin, a bisexual boy. Which, hi, that's my life? Most of the bisexual men I've been reading lately have been in M/M relationships, so it's nice to see a bisexual boy in a relationship with a girl. AND that they address the viewpoint of many people towards bi boys - that they'll cheat. (That's a biphobic attitude that is aimed at bi people of all genders, but it seems especially prevalent from women towards bi men.)

I love both of these characters; I love that they bring up that things can be so much easier to say via text than face-to-face. I love the far-reaching, random conversations the two have, and the in-jokes they create.

You'd think a romance would be hard to tell without description - only text is similar to only dialogue. But Johnson manages, and does it superbly.

This was the perfect book to break my reading slump, and I love it so much.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

the ending i just wanna cry

i enjoyed the concept, but i think it could have done with some prose chapters to flesh out the story more. some things were hard to follow, especially all the drama with haley's “friends” idk it was just missing something to help connect to the characters more

also, this book is formatted SO POORLY on kindle and definitely needs a quality check