At home with a new baby, I'm in need of lighter, fun books these days and everything about the premise of this one indicated it would be a great fit fAt home with a new baby, I'm in need of lighter, fun books these days and everything about the premise of this one indicated it would be a great fit for me. The protagonist's name is Bae, a name I loved and wanted to give my baby, and it's about a passion for books and reading and sharing those things with others. Sadly, the novel did not deliver on its premise.
Bae Babbage is 29 going on 30 (or perhaps 29 going on 14?) and a bit of a follower. Her best friend Cassandra is a dominating, judgemental type whose marriage, barely five minutes old, is destroyed when Bae reveals to the groom that Cassandra slept with a waiter on her hen's night. With Cass no longer speaking to her Bae leaves Perth for a new beginning in Melbourne, finding herself in a crappy marketing/advertising job (the two blur together) and whose only 'friends' are a woman, Martha, whom she talks to in the ladies' toilets but has never met or even seen, and the barista at the nearby cafe, Dino, who doesn't even seem to like her very much but who writes quotes around her takeaway coffee cup.
Then Bae discovers and buys a second-hand book full of annotations and she soon becomes obsessed by the idea that she can find and meet the mystery author of these scribbles. As she pursues flimsy clues she meets and falls into a relationship with Zach, is fired from her job, creates and hosts a new book sharing event with the help of Dino and Bae's Instagram Influencer sister, Lizzie (second runner-up on the Bachelor and doesn't let anyone forget it), and eventually establishes her own marketing business. But Zach isn't who he seems, Dino's hiding something, Lizzie keeps trying to turn her event into a dating one, and the hunt for the mystery scribbler puts Bae into hospital. But Bae is nothing if not determined!
My biggest complaint with this novel is the writing. It's poor. Being an author requires more than stringing a grammatically correct sentence together. To be truly good, you need style, a voice or tone, you need to understand structure and the timely placing of clues and information that both allows your reader to stay engaged by letting them figure things out, and prevents them becoming lost. I don't know how two people write a cohesive novel together, I really don't, it's not something I'd ever want to collaborate on, and I certainly couldn't tell when one of the two authors was writing or the other. But it read like a hobby, and a lazy one at that. It read like two people having fun putting together a story that really shouldn't have been published - at least, not without some serious editing. Too many niggling gaps, like when Dino kisses Bae and Bae does the whole "let's pretend this never happened" dance because she's thinking about Sunday, the woman who was only ever described as Dino's "silent business partner" (she's the cook at the cafe). This completely threw me, there had never been the slightest sign that a) Dino and Sunday were a couple or b) that Bae thought they were, prior to the kiss. Such inconsistencies are jarring, confusing and frustrating. These inconsistencies are one of the reasons why the novel as a whole felt rushed, sloppy and far from being a 'labour of love' that had undergone revisions and careful editing.
The story is also much too predictable, with too many deus ex machina moments (well, one would be more than enough). The first one - Zach - only makes his real role all that more predictable. The final 'reveal' is a bit of an eye-roll. In a small country town in the middle of nowhere, sure, but in Melbourne? Really?
And finally, the characters. I found it quite hard to get through this novel and finish it because there was nothing particularly interesting about Bae - I don't even really know what she looks like. She's a standard rom-com, 'chicklit' female protagonist - *yawn*. You could have had a checklist of stereotypical characters and ticked them off: ditzy blonde, token gay, broody love interest, handsome decoy, eccentric older lady etc.
I can't recommend this novel, it's really not worth it. I was quite disappointed and even the passion for books that Bae has and the literary references couldn't save it. They were, in fact, muted and lacklustre. The premise - finding the 'mystery writer' - became increasingly flimsy and rather boring; the love triangle (the blurb bills it as a 'love quadrangle' but I couldn't see it) is stale; the writing is of poor quality and overall, there just isn't anything good I can say about this one. ...more
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