lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2020-04-03 09:28 pm
lightreads) wrote2020-04-03 09:28 pm
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The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary
The Flatshare
3/5. Modern het epistolary romance. He's a palliative care nurse with a brother in prison. She's a book editor emerging from an abusive relationship. They share a flat, and a bedroom, and a bed, but he works nights and she works days so they take it in shifts and communicate largely by sticky note.
Yes yes. OMG they were roommates, etc.
Great concept, and I am weak for epistolary. But there's an awful lot of that is not how that works. That is not how that works at all in this book regarding, like, eight different major plot elements. And more fundamentally, you can't present me with a woman who is just starting to understand how thoroughly she was gaslit by her ex and how gullible and vulnerable she was to his manipulations, and have her roommate's brother in prison call out of the blue and tell her his whole story about how he was falsely convicted and have her immediately believe him without any actual evidence or, like, details aside from some pretty fake-sounding nonsense. Because yikes. I mean I assumed he actually was innocent, because it's that kind of book, but the conjunction of these two B plots was extremely unfortunate. The book was trying to show what a good person she is. It was instead rather stressful.
Content notes: Stalking, emotional abuse, related trauma.
3/5. Modern het epistolary romance. He's a palliative care nurse with a brother in prison. She's a book editor emerging from an abusive relationship. They share a flat, and a bedroom, and a bed, but he works nights and she works days so they take it in shifts and communicate largely by sticky note.
Yes yes. OMG they were roommates, etc.
Great concept, and I am weak for epistolary. But there's an awful lot of that is not how that works. That is not how that works at all in this book regarding, like, eight different major plot elements. And more fundamentally, you can't present me with a woman who is just starting to understand how thoroughly she was gaslit by her ex and how gullible and vulnerable she was to his manipulations, and have her roommate's brother in prison call out of the blue and tell her his whole story about how he was falsely convicted and have her immediately believe him without any actual evidence or, like, details aside from some pretty fake-sounding nonsense. Because yikes. I mean I assumed he actually was innocent, because it's that kind of book, but the conjunction of these two B plots was extremely unfortunate. The book was trying to show what a good person she is. It was instead rather stressful.
Content notes: Stalking, emotional abuse, related trauma.