The one where a buttoned up graduate student gets drunk gay married in Vegas and her life is turned upside down.
This is a very good debut not completely to my tastes. Mostly it just felt overwritten in parts. There were many instances of sentences where you could just lop off the last part of it and the impact would have been much greater. And the excessive poetic repetition really got to me. I was particularly annoyed every time Grace mentioned that Yuki and/or her things smelled like sea salt. (Does sea salt even have a smell? I just stuck my nose in my container of it and I’ve got nothing.) And anyway! I do not like when authors talk all the time about the way people smell! It’s tyranny! I am very sensitive to smells, and very much appreciate it when authors say things like “her hair smelled of shampoo” instead of “her hair smelled of strawberry shampoo”. Gag. Let me imagine the smells for myself!
(Except when you are talking about food or clean laundry and also nature. Please, describe all of those smells to me in excessive detail.)
Anyway, aside from those issues, I really liked this. It’s billed as a romance, and while it does have romance in it, I would describe it more as an emotional journey of healing for our main character, Grace, who has just graduated with her PhD in Astronomy and now has no idea what to do. A sort of late coming-of-age, because she didn’t allow herself to go through the process earlier. Mixed in with all of that are issues of mental health and race and friendship. There is a heavy influence on queer found families that I really loved as well.
Oh, and one last thing. I do wish Yuki’s radio show had been portrayed more realistically, like with people calling in, and narration with more detail, and with a length that would actually fill the time frame of a radio show. If you read the radio show sections out loud they don’t last for more than five minutes, and there’s no indication we’re missing any time. Again, small complaints! I will be reading Morgan Rogers’ future books, just to see how she grows as a writer. And I hope she tones it down a little.
[3.5 stars]
