The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Good – I bought this book when it first came out in 2023. The synopsis and feel reminded me of a Benedict Society or a Lemony Snicket, something that would be fun and dreadfully clever. I wasn’t able to pick up the book and begin reading until very recently. Life gets in the way of writing sometimes and I am embarrassed to say I haven’t written a proper book study in a long time.

Fast forward to now. I am starting to work again on my book studies and clocking massive reading hours again. I have a section on my bookshelf of books that I want to write studies for, and this was next on the list. I started reading. It was almost exactly what I expected, a fairly well written book in the snarky and clever tone that is currently popular and that I rather enjoy. The first five chapters were fun and I read through them rather quickly.

The Bad – Within the first 100 pages a character gets introduced at a family gathering. I noticed that the author gave them the they/them pronouns, but I shook it off thinking it was just a writing style thing. No, it wasn’t. This same family gathering also introduced a male relative who marries men. I had to reread the passage several times because I kept thinking I had misread or misunderstood it. I had not. When I bought this book, I had no idea that this was what it was about. I can imagine that many people didn’t. I am pretty good at picking up books and reading the back cover and discerning content. This one fooled me. Mostly because I was really excited about all the plays on words that I expected, I didn’t think about how that might get played out.

The Ugly – Later in the book a trans character is introduced. I know this is a hot topic right now and very controversial and will sell books to a certain segment of readers. I am not one of them. To me, the ugliest part was that I was really looking forward to this book. It was such a great premise.

As a side note, we started this as a read aloud. Before any of the they/them, etc stuff started, my boys made me stop. They hated it even before the controversial topics came in to play. We probably would have stopped at the non-binary character, if we had made it that far together. I did continue to read and was really trying to write a book study off of it, but I just couldn’t. We openly discuss these topics in our home and have introduced them because they are everywhere and we prefer to have our kids hear from us about it. I get to decide that for our family, but I won’t write a study for others.