This ending was the EXACT ENDING I’ve wanted to see for SO LONG. (Unapologetic all caps.) It took us ages to get there (more on that in a sec) but once we did? CHEF’S KISS.
Spoilery: it’s an f/f romance, and one half of the pair is affianced, to an amazing man, who’s gay, and they are going to use their marriage to give themselves and their true partners a safe harbor from society, and they go through with their marriage, and it’s just beautifully done, and… sniff I have a lot of feelings about friendships and healthy communication and unconventional choices and that kind of love.
On the ages to get there: it’s finally what I declared I wanted after Something Fabulous, chaotic sexual self-discovery on the female side. Hoo boy, is it chaotic. Eddie is a hot mess and gloriously clueless and it’s great fun. It intentionally plays fast and loose with some anachronisms but I also have a feeling the whole dramatic gothic lit scene was basically just like this, not so anachronistic after all.
For something so broadly funny, there’s gobs of nuance. I adore every bit of Albert. Other notes:
- The epigraph! (“I wrote this book out of love and spite. To those it’s for: you know who you are, respectively.”)
- PRACTICE KISSING FAVORITE TROPE
- So many friends-to-lovers actually present the friendship as lesser… this gets it just right where the very passionate friendship is as powerful and complex as the romance
- The necessary growing pains and new boundaries for such an intense friendship
- The way it doesn’t demean love and friendship and conversation and mundane things like the radical artists do
- Calling out that particularly awful liberal thing of expecting someone (in this case Rose, being from China) to fit a certain expectation of a minority
- ROSE’S FAMILY
- “None of us are true originals, Eddie. We piece an approximation of a person together from finding what we like and eschewing what we hate, and somewhere in that muddle we find ourselves.”