Rating: WARTY!
I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this novel wasn't at all what I'd hoped for from the blurb. OTOH, what novel is? Very few of them, to be sure. Rest assured that it's as far from "an audaciously witty debut" as it's possible to get. So Rachel B Glaser and I be unhappy with her effort. It started out interestingly enough, but there was a current underlying it which was obnoxious, and it quickly began to trudge and stumble.
I'd hoped it would get sanded down and become a lot more smooth as the story grew, but the ever-dragging story never did grow wheels, and so the rough edges prevailed. I made it literally half way through - to the end of chapter eight before I gave up on it. It was boring, repetitive and uninventive, and there were no characters in it that I liked. The most obnoxious characters were the titular ones and in that same order, too.
The story is apparently set in modern times, but there are weird anachronisms, so maybe it was set in the past and I missed something which explained this, because there were two mentions, one of a Walkman, and one of a Discman, featured in it despite the novel being published in 2015. It was very confusing. The novel does cover a decade, and of course the Walkman name is still around, but the Discman name belongs to the eighties, so while it's possible these referred to modern devices, this didn't alleviate the confusion.
The reason it didn't is that if this was indeed a modern setting (even from the last ten to fifteen years), then all of these people were complete morons in having routine, unprotected sex with multiple partners, and yet not a single one of them ever considered, not even for a second, that there was anything wrong with it or dangerous about it.
The main character, Paulina, was one of the most uninteresting, self-absorbed, bitchy, and obnoxious characters I've ever read about. She had no redeeming feature whatsoever, and was totally uninteresting to me. She and her co-dependent, Fran, were art students, and the author managed to make even that tedious to read about. Fran was a complete wallflower. Neither of them deserved any sort of decent relationship or any happiness, so it was nice to see that they were getting none. Why anyone would be remotely interested in either of them even as an acquaintance, much less a friend or a lover, was a complete mystery.
Some reviewers made mention of this as reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie - and they did not intend that in a positive light. I agree. It's like post-Annie Hall Woody Allen, when his movies were not even remotely funny, and just became a rambling, self-absorbed mess about unsurprisingly clichéd tropes. I refuse to recommend pretentious and tired drivel like this, which some Big publishing™ editor evidently and mistakenly considered to be a work of art.
