Reviews with content warning for Death - The Flip Side

Would you leave your life up to chance? Would you make decisions based on the flip of a coin? After Josh loses his girlfriend, his job and his home all in one spectacular evening, he vows to make different decisions: he decides to spend the next year letting a 50 pence coin choose his fate.

Sadly, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of this book (I couldn’t resist a terrible pun, sorry!) and it really fell flat for me. I struggled to feel invested in the storyline or the main character and there were several small aspects that personally annoyed me. I had been really excited for this book and I tried really hard to love it, but I found reading it to be a chore.

This is clearly intended to be a funny book and I can definitely see the hilarity in some of the situations. Unfortunately, I personally don’t like situations that make me cringe; I don’t find them funny, they just made me uncomfortable. The main character, Josh, ends up in some really unfortunate scenarios that bordered on the ridiculous, but because they were so cringey I couldn't find them funny! If cringe-worthy scenes don’t make you uncomfortable, and you happily laugh at a character’s misfortune, then I do think you’d enjoy this book far more than me –– it’s just not to my personal taste.

It did pick up after about 40% and I found myself more invested in the romantic aspect of the plot. I started to enjoy it more and even root for Josh, who I had struggled to like for the first part of the novel. I liked seeing him exploring the different bookshops in Germany and Amsterdam in his search for his 'Sunflower Girl' and though it was obvious that he would find her eventually, I was excited to find out how the pair would be reunited. And...then it went downhill for me.

There were a few hints leading up to a significant event in the novel and a few pages before it happened, I knew that the complication to Josh’s new relationship would be his Pap getting ill and he would have to rush back home. The whole situation felt underdeveloped and glossed over. In only a few pages, Josh received a phone call, flew home and his Pap was dead. He was little upset about it but quickly worried more about Sunflower Girl. I felt like it should’ve been more of a traumatic event, and it read as though the book wasn’t quite long enough yet for the resolution, so a character death was needed to extend the story and the tension for a little bit longer. Personally, it threw me right back out of the novel.

Finally, there were just a couple of minor comments in the book that personally annoyed me. About 4 or 5 chapters in, a man Josh describes as having an anxiety disorder ends up having a panic attack at their family celebration. Whilst this is clearly intended to be funny and pokes fun at the man and the situation, in which people are frantically panicking and moving furniture and creating chaos, I just found it unnecessary. I like to think we’ve moved past the need to use mental health as a source of humour and amusement. And secondly, there’s a comment about Josh’s Sunflower Girl being ‘naturally beautiful’ before he goes on to talk about her having minimal make-up, along with frequent references to how ‘different’ she is, presumably as opposed to other girls. The novel, therefore, falls into the classic ‘not like other girls’ trope that I don’t really like; it places women in competition with each other and implies that certain women have an inherently greater value to others based on their choices. These are only minor things that someone really enjoying the book might not have even noticed, but I thought they were worth mentioning as they did lessen my enjoyment of the book.

I am gutted that I didn’t end up loving this book. I really did want to love it, especially as it has been compared to The Flatshare, but unfortunately, it was just not for me.

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