Spoilers in this review.
Here's one: Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly is a terrible book.
The plot: Dahlia and London are contestants on a reality TV cooking show. They fall in love.
The conflict: None.
The characters: So bland they barely exist.
My biggest criticism of this book is that is just so fucking lazy. I know I'm going to sound like an old coot here, but when I started writing my smutty, dark dystopian novel, Mindgames, the internet barely existed. When I wanted to figure out what plants my healer character Gabriel would use for particular ailments, I bought books on herbal medicine. And I used them. Before I finished the novel Google had come along, and when I had questions about how some of the characters would take care of horses I researched it online, which was a lot easier even if potentially inaccurate.
The amount of research done by Kelly, apparently: None. Not a single google search.
Here's an example: Dahlia grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford is a city I happen to know something about. It's a working class fishing town with a large Portuguese-American population. (Back in the day it was a whaling town, and the opening of Moby Dick is set there.) Dahlia would not be from New Bedford. The journey she and her high school sweetheart, now ex-husband would have had to have made from a New Bedford childhood to a college-educated adulthood as yuppies living in Maryland would be an interesting story. But in this book it didn't happen.
And there's this: Dahlia makes her mark on the cooking show by being really good at scaling and cooking fish. That makes total sense: a kid growing up in New Bedford would definitely be great with fish! Not only is New Bedford a fishing town, but there are a lot of people there who really love cooking. Phenomenal Portuguese bakeries. Three deckers where the owners cultivate grapes in the backyard so they can make their own wine. It all fits.
Except: Dahlia did not learn how to prepare fish in New Bedford. She took a class -- a single class -- on it in Baltimore. And she doesn't even like fish. Yet, somehow, after this one class after which she probably did not practice, she is somehow one of the best fish cooks in the country, or at least in the world of reality TV. That's offensive to people who actually work at being good cooks.
London is similarly a magically good cook. London's back story is that they are a rich dilettante who enjoys cooking but whose heart is really in music. Or in opening a summer camp for queer kids. Or whatever, it doesn't really matter, they're rich. But somehow they are the best cook on the show. We are never shown this, but we know it is true because we are told over and over what a great cook they are, and then they win. (Not that they care, the $100,000 prize is nothing to them.)
And speaking of reality TV: C'mon. The contestants go home when they are eliminated. Do you know long it took me to confirm that eliminated contestants don't go home for the obvious reason that then everyone would know that they had been eliminated? Three seconds. I timed it. I googled: when you get kicked off a reality TV show do you go home? Nope.
A major plotline of the book involves the show starting to air before taping was completed. That makes no sense whatsoever. How would the producers be able to put together the major arcs of the show if that were so? Also, again, three seconds to google: do reality shows air before taping is completed? Nope.
Let's talk conflict in this book: Let's see: London lives in Nashville where they grew up and loves it there and does not want to leave. Dahlia lives in a boring suburb in Maryland that she does not like and where she has no connections, and is unemployed. Oh no, however will they decide where to live?
London is non-binary. Dahlia is a cis woman who had been married to a man. But she identifies as queer and is completely open to dating people across the gender spectrum. Oh no, how will they overcome this hurdle?
I must also complain about Kelly's use of they/them pronouns in this book. I am old enough that when I was young I knew only a small handful of trans people and none well. I never to my knowledge met a non-binary person until I was well into middle age. I learned about proper use of pronouns from my kids and their friends, and I continue to make pronoun mistakes, and I feel bad (and am berated by my kids -- but not their friends, who are nicer to me) for not trying harder.
So when I kept stumbling over Kelly's use of "they" in referring to London in this book, I assumed it was me. But after a while I realized it was just sloppy writing.
If I have a sentence about two people who use she/her pronouns that says "Tonna and Alice went to the beach," my next sentence will not be, "She forgot her sand toys." I will refer to the person who forgot the toys by name, because otherwise the reader will not know who I am referring to. Even if I clear it up in the next sentence, it's bad writing.
Similarly, if Tonna and Alice use they/them pronouns, my next sentence should not be, "They forgot their sand toys."
But Kelly does this constantly. Here's a quote I pulled out at random: "[Dahlia] hoped it wasn't too obvious, the fact that all of the blood in her body was rushing toward specific places. It felt like it had been ten years since she'd last seen them." (The "them" in this sentence refers to London, not to Dahlia's toes or whatever "places" to which her blood was rushing.) (As a smut writer I found this entire passage horrendous.)
My hatred of the book continued through the very last passage. Dahlia is cooking and pulls an onion from the refrigerator. Here's the entire quote that ends the book:
Dahlia opened the fridge again and rummaged through the vegetable drawer. Ah, there. All the way in the back. She grabbed the onion and brought it over the the cutting board, its paper skin already starting to unravel.
And then she picked up her knife.
Is this supposed to be symbolism? Some kind of metaphor? If so, of what? Or is it the preface to the next book, which will be a horror story? And why in the holy hell would two people who are supposed to be tremendous cooks store an onion in the refrigerator? (Do I really need to google proper onion storage for you?)
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