allioth's reviews
61 reviews

I picked this book hoping to read something bad, and it seriously didn't disappoint.

I'm going to divide this by points because if I don't, I know I'll end up with more gray hairs than a wolf.

★ The plot

If I had to summarize it in one sentence, it would be the infamous AO3 tag:

Plot? What plot?

All the things that happen in this book are just a cheap excuse for the protagonists to have sex and/or thirst for each other.

THE """""MAIN""""" THEME IN THIS BOOK, GOLF, IS ALMOST NON-EXISTENT

They tell you how much Wells has improved or how Josephine is soooo good at reading the course, but you can never actually see that because oops, we don't have time for that! (But the book certainly has time for talking about Wells' ass, lmao.)

The Masters, the most important competition in Wells' career, is given one, ONE, chapter that is mainly used to talk about how the two protagonists love each other so much and can't stand to live apart (they've actually been talking for less than a month).

I literally laughed out loud when I read in the acknowledgments how Tessa thanked her husband for his golf insight, the insight in question being visible nowhere in the book. It almost makes me think that the author wrote an entirely different book yet-to-be-published with only the golf stuff, and all that was left for Fangirl Down was the cringey sex scenes and the abhorrent dialogue.

And you'll say after reading this...

"But Allioth, that surely must mean that the book is just more character-focused...."

And to that, I answer:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA




★ The characters (secondary)

Uuuuh.... Josephine’s parents are nice...? 
Lizard boy (Ricky) is okay??? 
Calhoun and Wells' mentor (Buck Lee) are there too, I suppose. 
And Tallulah and Burgess (the worst name I've ever heard, by the way) just exist to set up the sequel that I hope I never have to hear about again.

The best character of this bunch, and in general, is Wells' manager. He only appears for like three scenes and still manages to be funnier than the protagonists by a wide margin. So here are some quotes because this is the only part of the book worth reading:

(not) Fun fact: Wells' ass gets mentioned more times than any of the characters I just talked about :)

★ The characters (protagonists)

Josephine: Starting with the one I hate the least out of the two, maybe because in a competition against a rock, the rock has a thousand times more personality than her. The book tries to teach an (actually valuable) lesson about how you shouldn't reduce someone to just their disability, and while I agree, this statement is immediately overpowered by every dam thing Josephine says in this book.

The problems with her parents?It's the diabetes.
Her money problem? It's the diabetes.
Her constant refusal for help? It's the diabetes.
The reason for nearly every conflict she has in this book?It's a consequence of her decis... Nah, I'm joking, it's the diabetes.

The only reason she stays with Wells is because he did something nice ONCE, but that's enough for Ms. No Standards, who decides to abandon her family store in order to manage her man-child boyfriend.

Maybe if the story focused more on her struggles as a female caddie in an obviously male-dominated sport, it would've been better (aka instantly repellant for our dear Tessa Bailey). I wish I could say more about her, but that's how boring she is. The only silver lining is that she's nowhere near as infuriating as Wells.

Wells: Ah, the bad boy golfer himself. He's an ass to absolutely everyone and still demands pure and complete loyalty.

To give an idea of how much I hated this man, the text could've said:

"Wells blinked"

And the first thought in my mind would right away be:

"I hate this dude so much."

He has NO friends, NO hobbies, NO family, and almost NO job, but somehow I'm still supposed to find him appealing??? This cannot even be compensated with his personality, because the only thing he does is swear and be horny. Every single "sweet" moment he has is just because the thing he did before that was atrociously evil-natured/possessive.

Some examples include:

▪︎ Getting mad at Josephine for hanging out with someone. 
▪︎ Getting mad at Josephine because she stopped being his fan after he treated her like ass. 
▪︎ Picking fights the moment Josephine isn't there, like he's some kind of wild animal that thinks with his penis instead of his brain.

And at the end of the book, they try to gaslight you into thinking that he actually changed, even though he still treats everyone around him like garbage until three lines ago.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.




★ The romance (if you can even call it that)

One word:
non-existent.

For some reason, I'm supposed to believe that the interactions the two main characters have are actually meaningful and cute and not a bunch of basic half-cooked advice taken from a self-help book/horniness/fights.



But she's the one, guys, so it's totally fine if the relationship is stripped of any actual development or chemistry and instead replaced with a possessive and codependent man who can't live without a woman fixing every mistake he makes!

And don't even get me started on how in order for Wells to listen and actually PERFORM WELL, Josephine gives him, to put it simply, sexual favors.

I'm not going to dwell on this any longer, or my veins will pop out.




In conclusion, trash won't even begin to describe this book, and unpleasant will be a pitiful understatement of my experience reading this collection of words that dares to call itself a novel.

The concept of this book is really interesting, and the world-building presented at the start is, needless to say, very creative.

It made me wish it stayed like that for the rest of the 130 pages.

The first thing that came to my attention was how confusing the demographic for this book is. The writing is straightforward, leaving no room for nuance, which in a kids' story is the standard. But then you have the sometimes hard-to-follow info-dumping, the footnotes, and the medical terms that make you doubt who this book was actually aimed at.

I like how it switches from third person to first person in the protagonist, Jill's, case. But otherwise, most of the other perspectives (such as Mike's) feel like pointless ramblings that lead to absolutely nothing. In any story, this would be bad, but it especially affects *Spirals of Stardust* due to its length.

All the things I previously mentioned are passable at best and annoying at worst. However, they didn't take much from my overall enjoyment as much as the simple fact that the core of this book, a dystopian world in the 23rd century where animals behave and take the place left by the long-extinct humans, is quickly forgotten in favor of a sweet but superficial lesson about how everyone is different and that they don't have to follow the same path to achieve what they want (and that alternative medicine is cool, I suppose).

Plenty more could've been achieved through the premise of this story (how certain animals feel being assigned a particular role they can't escape from, slightly touched on in one of Mike's aggravating POVs), but sadly that wasn't the case.

An overall "meh" book that could've done so much more if it only had time (and a clear idea of what it wanted to convey).

The ADHD representation was nice, though.