Please note that I received this via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
There was zero need for this book. I have zero idea why it was written unless Caroline Kepnes wanted to really write about Sex and the City. All this book does is make you hate Joe some more. There’s no special insight into him at all at the age of 17. He’s still insane and falls in love with someone and does whatever it takes to keep them away from any man he deems unworthy. The ending was a joke.
We start off following Joe who is 17, working for Mr. Mooney, but still a virgin. He reads a missed connection and realizes it’s about him and goes to meet the woman that he knows is going to be the love of his life, Vail. And if you read any of the books in this series, you know that it is mostly you reading about how Joe is obsessed with Vail, how he knows he and Vail belong together, and you get Joe judging the crap out of Vail if she does one thing that he does not like. This prequel offers no new insights into Joe. It does not make you like him. If anything, it makes you despise him more and you hope that someone can put a stop to him (of course that doesn’t happen, this is a prequel and no that’s not a spoiler, this is a series). I actually felt sorry for Vail while reading this story. She didn’t deserve Joe and his insanity. When you get to the reveals of how Vail even decided to reach out to Joe though, some sympathy may be reduced, but I actually still felt sorry for her.
The other characters we barely get to see in this one are not very developed. Mr. Mooney was seriously creepy and gross and I hated any time we had to go back to him in the story. Vail I do think that Kepnes developed her the best out of everyone, and yes that includes Joe. We also have some other characters such as Vail’s roomate, their friends, and also a rich drug addict that somehow Joe has hooked up with to sell books to. That guy was a mess and I hated every-time we panned back to him in the book too. At one point he eats a bandaid that was on his nipple. No, I have zero idea.
The flow of the story is just off. I got tired of reading about Joe and his penis. Seriously there’s tons of pages about it. I got tired of Joe talking about Sex and the City and finding insight into that series that not even Tik-tokers have found. I haven’t watched the series in a while, but there’s a whole freaking chapter of Joe narrating the whole Carrie/Big thing and I could not believe that Kepnes even did this mess.
The setting of New York just falls flat in this one. I think in the first book you really got the idea that Joe loved New York, literature, etc. and in this, he’s just small and pathetic. If he was a normal teenage boy he would have played some sad songs and cried a lot and complained to his friends (oh yeah he has zero) about Vail. But nope. Joe has to Joe.
The ending was just a letdown. I don’t even know what to say. We all knew where things were leading, but it’s just hilarious that the ending just reinforces that Joe is totally oblivious to anything when he is focused on his “You” women.
