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A review by opalmars
Like Real People Do by E.L. Massey
3.0
3,5 *
This book reads like fanfiction (which I know is what it actually started as). But when you publish a fanfiction and separate it from the original story, you have to do some work creating a world and building up the characters.
The start of this story is very abrupt. It genuinely felt like the first chunk of the book was missing! Pretty much nothing is established, and a couple of pages in, when the characters meet for the 1st time, they’re all already talking to each other as if they’re old friends. They literally become super close (joking around, hanging out, facetiming regularly and texting all the time) in a matter of *hours*. They knew each other for 2 hours, yet behaved the way you’d only behave with your friends of 10 years. It was insanely distracting! None of the friendships or romances were developed — everything literally came out of nowhere.
These things are fine when you’re reading a fanfic, because you already know and love the characters, so the author doesn’t actually need to build up their relationships in the text, because everyone reading the fanfic already knows how those characters become friends/partners. However, when you remove those characters from their world and try to create original content with them, you need to build everything up from scratch — and that includes the characters themselves, the friendships, the romances and the world. And, unfortunately, none of that was properly built up here. I’m sure this is really good as a fanfic, but when removed from the context of the original story, it unfortunately doesn’t work very well. It simply does not stand on its own.
Additionally, it’s very clear that the author didn’t care about pretty much anything other than the romance. Again, this is fine (and expected! and appreciated!) in a fanfic, but when you have a whole book where literally nothing other than the main relationship is even properly established, it becomes annoying to read. Some examples:
✘ Nothing about hockey was explained. The author expects the readers to already know everything about the sport. Also, a lot of US sports acronyms were used without explanation.
✘ The MC is supposedly a figure skater, yet we never see him practice. He also does ballet, but I literally forgot about it bc it’s only mentioned twice in the whole book lmaoooo
This book reads like fanfiction (which I know is what it actually started as). But when you publish a fanfiction and separate it from the original story, you have to do some work creating a world and building up the characters.
The start of this story is very abrupt. It genuinely felt like the first chunk of the book was missing! Pretty much nothing is established, and a couple of pages in, when the characters meet for the 1st time, they’re all already talking to each other as if they’re old friends. They literally become super close (joking around, hanging out, facetiming regularly and texting all the time) in a matter of *hours*. They knew each other for 2 hours, yet behaved the way you’d only behave with your friends of 10 years. It was insanely distracting! None of the friendships or romances were developed — everything literally came out of nowhere.
These things are fine when you’re reading a fanfic, because you already know and love the characters, so the author doesn’t actually need to build up their relationships in the text, because everyone reading the fanfic already knows how those characters become friends/partners. However, when you remove those characters from their world and try to create original content with them, you need to build everything up from scratch — and that includes the characters themselves, the friendships, the romances and the world. And, unfortunately, none of that was properly built up here. I’m sure this is really good as a fanfic, but when removed from the context of the original story, it unfortunately doesn’t work very well. It simply does not stand on its own.
Additionally, it’s very clear that the author didn’t care about pretty much anything other than the romance. Again, this is fine (and expected! and appreciated!) in a fanfic, but when you have a whole book where literally nothing other than the main relationship is even properly established, it becomes annoying to read. Some examples:
✘ Nothing about hockey was explained. The author expects the readers to already know everything about the sport. Also, a lot of US sports acronyms were used without explanation.
✘ The MC is supposedly a figure skater, yet we never see him practice. He also does ballet, but I literally forgot about it bc it’s only mentioned twice in the whole book lmaoooo