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A review by sixbutspelledout
Best Men by Sidney Karger
1.0
Best Men has the bones of a potentially good book but fails in execution on basically every metric.
Sidney Karger is tediously hyperfixated on categorizing types of gays and spends all 340 pages of this book reenforcing harmful stereotypes in the worst way. If you are someone who is younger and looking for queer representation to help you find your place in the world, please know that the world is better than the complete trash seen in this book.
Paige is the worst kind of bigoted ally who thinks they’re the “cool supportive friend” but spends the entire book objectifying Max. The final conflict of this book is Max finally calling Paige out on this, whereupon every single person in Max’s life gaslights him into thinking Paige - who has spent hundreds of pages making it clear Max is only valuable to her as a flamboyant, high-energy, party-planner-gay - has done nothing wrong and the issue is entirely his own self-hatred and internalized homophobia.
Outside of my thoughts on the piss poor cultural politics of the book, it’s written quite poorly. It reads like a constant stream-of-thought from the most cringe Millennial imaginable. On top of that the book spends significantly more time on the Max/Paige relationship than it does the Max/Chasten relationship. This is barely a romance novel.
This book could really have used an honest editor. It’s not beyond saving, but the published product is absolutely not worth your time.
Sidney Karger is tediously hyperfixated on categorizing types of gays and spends all 340 pages of this book reenforcing harmful stereotypes in the worst way. If you are someone who is younger and looking for queer representation to help you find your place in the world, please know that the world is better than the complete trash seen in this book.
Paige is the worst kind of bigoted ally who thinks they’re the “cool supportive friend” but spends the entire book objectifying Max. The final conflict of this book is Max finally calling Paige out on this, whereupon every single person in Max’s life gaslights him into thinking Paige - who has spent hundreds of pages making it clear Max is only valuable to her as a flamboyant, high-energy, party-planner-gay - has done nothing wrong and the issue is entirely his own self-hatred and internalized homophobia.
Outside of my thoughts on the piss poor cultural politics of the book, it’s written quite poorly. It reads like a constant stream-of-thought from the most cringe Millennial imaginable. On top of that the book spends significantly more time on the Max/Paige relationship than it does the Max/Chasten relationship. This is barely a romance novel.
This book could really have used an honest editor. It’s not beyond saving, but the published product is absolutely not worth your time.