Bingo squares:
Left (Phoebe Berman feels Left behind with her 30th birthday and her sister’s wedding approaching)
Friends (Disaster Gay Detective Agency follows a group of Friends).
This might seem like an odd pairing to review together but it’s basically because I read these somewhat close together and both left me disappointed in a similar way: they were books I expected to be fun, breezy reads that ended up not being as fun or funny as I wanted and ultimately were a bit tedious, even.
Phoebe was a book club choice but I still thought it would be an entertaining read. Phoebe is about to turn 30, her little sister is getting married, and it’s just hitting Phoebe extra hard yet again that she is still a virgin. When she was about to get her first kiss in 7th or 8th grade, she made herself so nervous about it that she threw up, and ever since then, she has continued to obsess over love through romance novels while getting panic attacks whenever she comes close to physical intimacy.
I thought the premise of an almost 30 year old woman dealing with sex and dating could be fun but something about the execution just left me more annoyed with Phoebe than sympathetic towards her (and this is as someone who is glad they aren’t in their teens/twenties today – as bad as the body image issues of the 90s were and the idea of slut shaming, I also get the impression that sex was easier then? Like, we are more open about orientation and sex expression now but sex itself is also more complicated and the whole incel thing is worse?). I think there are a few things leading to my issues with Phoebe: there are quite a few scenes that maybe should have been humorous but instead were a bit cringe/anxiety inducing because Phoebe is just being so awkward in how she interacts with people – like she hasn’t had sex, she hasn’t lived under a rock for the last 3 decades. She also has a bit of the “beautiful but doesn’t know it” thing going on (hate that trope). Within the context of this novel, she is a pretty crappy friend. Now that’s likely because she has tunnel vision about her quest but it basically means she comes off as a self absorbed. And the combination of tunnel vision and other decisions make her seem younger than she is. You don’t need to be sexually active to be a fully functioning adult!
She creates a list of tasks as part of her mission but some of them are just such obvious bad ideas – like, she put on flirt with older, male coworker when it was obviously a horrible idea. She also has one along the lines of “meet and flirt with cute dog owner,” and then when the situation arises, gets mad at her friend for speaking to the dog owner while Phoebe is completely focused on the dog and didn’t even realize there was a guy to flirt with until she saw her friend interact with him.
Everyone else in book club had a lot of fun with and said it was very much a vibes based book, it just wasn’t hitting the right ones for me.
This one seemed like it should be so fun – messy friends trying to solve a crime together? The core group has four people: Brandon, a young gay man that works night shift at a hotel and is in love with love; Ian, Brandon’s roommate, a drag queen and bookstore worker with anger issues who is still wrapped up in their hurt about their last break up; Ollie, a dog walker/house sitter who’s still dealing with his dad’s sudden death, pretty much constantly high, and obsessed with murder podcasts; and finally, Nicole, the high achieving token lesbian of the friend group, and the closest to having her act together but a disaster outside of work.
Not surprisingly, it’s through Brandon and an ill-fated fling at work that they all get dragged into an investigation; first to find the crush that ghosted him, then to figure out why they witness a murder while tracking him down. I think the murder-spy story was maybe overly complex and not that entertaining for this story (it wasn’t fun spy stuff like Allie Carter). I actually liked most of the characters but I couldn’t deal with Brandon because he was so ridiculously clueless and looking at everything through rose colored glasses. I mostly liked Ollie, but there’s one decision he made that basically made me anxious and was a nice reminder of how much of a rule follower I am (but like, you can’t host a party to determine if someone is a murderer at the place you are house sitting – I kept waiting for that to blow up in his face and him to get fired; have I ever mentioned that I hated Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a kid because even though I knew he didn’t get caught, that whole end sequence just made me anxious).
The other thing that really hurt the novel, especially in the later half was the structure. The novel swaps POVs between all four of the characters; earlier in the book, the author uses the text messages between the characters to anchor the reader to the timeline and help show which things are happening simultaneously. It’s not too bad or repetitive when they are all off on their own. The problem is during Ollie’s party when we get the party from each character’s point of view. This can be a very fun set up and structure on TV shows (it’s the whole premise of the afterparty, there’s a great Community episode that does this) but it does not work in this book and severely drags it down. I am not sure if it’s just something that works better in a visual medium or if the biggest problem is that the POVs aren’t distinct enough so we keep replaying the same scene with slightly different commentary rather than learning that much new between them.
I guess I didn’t need to combine these reviews but basically didn’t want to write the opening paragraph twice. These might work better for someone else but I know of two other people that have read or are reading The Disaster Gay Detective Agency and they also were disappointed.
