loverofeels's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Spoiler
i was also really disappointed by the way the story was resolved. the love interest, robin, is alice's former who convinces her to move from their small hometown to san francisco. this promising romance was ruined for me after the two of them spent almost the entirety of the novel being mad at one another for... unclear reasons? it seems like alice is pissed that women were flirting with robin when the two of them ran into one another at pride (at a point in the story where alice had freshly broken up her six year relationship and she and robin were "just friends"!!), and this small resentment carries them for a hundred pages of refusing to text one another.
robin is a flirt with commitment issues; throughout the novel, we see her hooking up with a long series of women, all of whom she treats somewhat coldly. she has a hard-and-fast rule about not staying the night or letting others stay the night at her place, even to the point that she yells at one of her hookups for staying until morning after the two of them stumbled in drunk late at night, had sex, and fell asleep. robin is unafraid to ghost (even blocking the number of her actual girlfriend!) and is generally inconsiderate of her lovers' feelings. the one exception—the single woman who can capture her attention for more than one night—is, of course, alice.
this would all have been fine—it's interesting to have a flawed love interest—except that robin... never changes? i hoped to see robin apologize/feel guilt/change her ways as part of her arc of realizing she and alice are #MeantToBe. instead, she *literally* runs away from a woman she's on a date with (cutting her off mid-sentence!) when she has her eureka moment about realizing she loves alice. the effect is that 1) robin comes off as a massive dick from beginning to end and 2) the narrative seems to imply that having a lot of partners/doing one night stands makes someone unkind and unreasonable, but they will be a better person if they just become monogamous. again, a weird message for a book ostensibly celebrating the many forms that (gay) sex can take!
alice and robin's love story arc is just... not very romantic? it's implied that robin has a long-term crush on alice that she hasn't even acknowledged to herself, but because we don't know anything about their lives before moving to SF (besides what's depicted in the first few pages) there's not much romance to interpolate from there. as stated previously, the two spend the majority of the book not speaking to one another. the event that unites them is that alice drunkenly sexts robin WHILE SHE HAS A GIRLFRIEND. yikes! next thing we know, robin is showing up to alice's place of employment with flowers and cake and then the two of them are having sex on the floor of leatherland. there's great chemistry between the characters in terms of how they are drawn, but story-wise? not so much. i really disliked the way that alice's girlfriend on whom she cheated is just pushed out of the narrative ("oh fuck, i guess i gotta break up with my perfect girlfriend right now" alice muses to herself the morning after drunk-sexting robin. this breakup is not portrayed on page). i'm sorry, i'm just supposed to forgive and forget even though the catalyst of the story is that alice's girlfriend cheats on her? but now that alice is doing the same thing it's fine because it's for true love?? even though her true love is a douchebag and the girl she cheats on seems extremely nice and compatible with alice???
i greatly enjoyed alice in leatherland at the beginning, but the final third of the story was one betrayal after another.
Spoiler
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Alcohol and Infidelity
Minor: Pregnancy
More...