Love, Hate and Clickbait

He glided through life with effortless confidence and a bottomless appetite for crushing his enemies.

This book sounded like something I was practically doomed to love, but alas, it didn’t quite work out between us. Mostly because it was so full of unlikable people who, with one single exception, committed the crime of also being thoroughly unentertaining. Like, seriously, reading about bad people doing bad things for bad reasons is a special sort of drug, but they must be compelling. They must be three-dimensional. They must be, in some ways that make me question too much about myself, relatable. Or at the very least, they should be fun.

Here, we’ve got an oddly small, claustrophobic political full of people who don’t give a damn about any of the causes they supposedly champion, and they’re all so, so boring. Like, completely flat. I suppose Lennie has her moments, a couple of times, but those are also the times when she’s very openly used as a plot device and the entertainment comes from what she does, not who she is. It is highly unclear why she does it. Beyond the fact that she probably wants power, but why, to what end, with which nuances? Inquiring minds shall never know.

The one actually interesting unlikable character here is Thom, the MC, and he’s the one who fully carried the first half of the novel for me. He’s just a complete sociopathic bastard with so many layers of coldness, ruthlessness, callousness and fake charm to him, and I just wanted to dig into those layers and see if there might be something like a heart buried beneath them. I kind of hated him throughout, but he was really fun to hate. And amidst it all, he had some surprisingly positive moments, too, like his totally chill reaction to his bi awakening.

Clay, on his part, was rather blah, especially during the first half of the book. He’s probably one of the better people in this whole menagerie, but his brand of “clueless dork“ charm was a miss for me, and I couldn’t begin to feel invested in his chapters. That changed around the middle of the story when the guys started spending more time alone in his apartment and he started gaining some depth. That’s coincidentally when I began slowly buying into the romance and sensing some of the chemistry that was supposedly oh so evident to everyone but the leads. I guess in the end I didn’t mind seeing them reach their HEA but I also wasn’t particularly rooting for them. When the HEA came, I might have actually got a bit distracted by counting the plot holes and hanging plot threads…