Holly Bourne’s latest takes some familiar themes in this but with our focus very much on adult characters some of the issues are a little more triggering.
Alice, our main character, is definitely a character you will come to understand – whatever you actually think about her. Her work for a support charity means she is regularly seeing the worst of people. She, herself, has been raped by an ex-boyfriend and it’s evident that her experience continues to impact upon her. Alice is fed up with boyfriends lasting a few dates and then dumping her because she doesn’t measure up to their expectations. She wants to be loved for herself, and so comes up with a plan.
Determined to make men pay for their privilege, Alice decides she is going to act in the way she believes men will find appealing. She becomes a different person – Gretel – a woman who knows what she wants and is not going to pretend to be something else in order token other people happy. It seems to be an act of disassociation and when Alice comes up with the idea I felt quite angry – not that she had to do it, but because she’s making the same assumptions she is criticising others for making.
Perhaps inevitably, she ends up meeting Joshua, and as their dates progress things seem positive – but he thinks he’s with a confident young woman called Gretel. How can things work out when they’ve started on such a strange footing?
I received an ARC of this from NetGalley and formatting issues definitely impacted on my enjoyment of this. There were random sections of text that appeared, empty pages and – on occasion – pages that didn’t seem connected to what I’d just read. They didn’t (I think) drastically affect my reading but it didn’t help my ability to engage with the character.