A friend name dropped this author and I had no clue who they were so looked them up and found out that some of their novels are available in Libby with no wait time. The blurb kinda reminded me of Tokyo Tarareba Girls, which I really like, so decided to give this a shot. I say I don’t like romance, but that’s based on manga, I don’t think I’ve actually read a proper romance novel before? Lots of the mystery novels I read with female protagonists are also semi-romance and I usually don’t hate the romance in them.
I think the knitting club set-up is really good. Getting to know each girl in the club while also getting to see how the other girls’ relationships are progressing as background details to the main girl’s story, sounds very nice. Especially since they all seem so likeable.
Janie was also probably the most relatable female protagonist I’ve come across in a long time. And her inner dialogue was very entertaining. I loved the way her thoughts would go wild and then she would just blurt out whatever was currently in her train of thought.
So I read about 13% of the book and thought all the above about it being a good set-up and the characters being likeable. And then proceeded to not read any more of it until 2 weeks later when my loan expired and I had to (was luckily able to) renew it. I guess the lack of a mystery meant I didn’t feel intrigued about what was going to happen next. So I read to about 53% and got interested in what was going on with Jon. I thought his dad’s company was going to be doing some dodgy shit. But it ended up just him being a controlling asshole. Anyway I started stalling at around 67% when Janie gives in to ‘hot sex with Mr McHotPants’. It reminded me of when I was reading the second book of the Crescent City series and the characters just went on a super sex marathon and I got bored. I guess I just have no interest in reading sex scenes. Although to this book’s credit, I thought they were well written. I think it helped that it was from Janie’s point of view so it was still fairly amusing at times.
At this point I kind of remembered that I only like romcom manga that is 80% comedy and 20% romance. And so I can now confirm that a similar percentage split probably exists for novels, where my limit is 20-30% romance. I need the other 70-80% to be something that makes me want to keep reading, whether that be a mystery or the progression of non-romance plot.
I persevered though and I’m glad I did, because that knitting club fight scene was epic.
So I don’t really like characters like Quinn, but I did sort of feel sorry for him because Janie was totally giving mixed messages, but also not that sorry for him because if there was no chase there would be no story. And I understood Janie’s apprehension to dating a colleague/boss, but got a bit annoyed at her because her head and her actions were sooo out of sync, but also not that annoyed because if she didn’t act the way she did there would be no story progression. So I guess, while this was a good romance story, I can safely say romance stories are not for me.
Categories: Book Reviews
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