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A review by befsk
Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner
4.0
As someone who often takes fun in reading/watching things because I know it's going to be entertainingly bad, I completely relate to the premise of the book - a pair of high school girls start a public access TV show where they show terrible horror movies and lightly mock them.
The very short chapters and the swapping between the two protagonists every time is a little disconcerting at the start of the book. Their voices are very similar - which is actually realistic if these two are best friends. It does, however, make it difficult to tell the two apart for the first 10% of the book, but if you stick with it and remember that one of them has an absentee father and the other has aspirations to be on TV, then you're good.
After that initial problem I found it hard to put the book down because it's so sweet and realistic and fun, but not mindlessly so. It's got a sadness to it but the friendship between our two protagonists does a lot to move the story forwards and add heart to the book.
The love interest for Josie is so sweet and adorable and perfect. Slightly too unbelievably perfect, but I loved him regardless.
The girls are relatable and random and mildly funny. Not as funny as the book thinks it is though, unfortunately. I'm baffled as to why every idiot these two meet have the same random quirks. Like thinking that holding a fart damages your liver and keeping bread in your truck for snacks and claiming that something that they've been told is physically impossible is 'just my opinion'. The amount of people that have these specific traits must be a severely small amount because I've never met anyone with any, separately. Yet we meet 5 or 6 characters that do exactly this, to prove they're idiots and continue a running gag that they'd have no way of knowing anything about. Minor thing but it's really been pissing me off.
No matter what niggles I have with book, I cannot emphasise enough how fun and sweet it is. It grabbed me and didn't let me go.
I received this ARC through Netgalley.
The very short chapters and the swapping between the two protagonists every time is a little disconcerting at the start of the book. Their voices are very similar - which is actually realistic if these two are best friends. It does, however, make it difficult to tell the two apart for the first 10% of the book, but if you stick with it and remember that one of them has an absentee father and the other has aspirations to be on TV, then you're good.
After that initial problem I found it hard to put the book down because it's so sweet and realistic and fun, but not mindlessly so. It's got a sadness to it but the friendship between our two protagonists does a lot to move the story forwards and add heart to the book.
The love interest for Josie is so sweet and adorable and perfect. Slightly too unbelievably perfect, but I loved him regardless.
The girls are relatable and random and mildly funny. Not as funny as the book thinks it is though, unfortunately. I'm baffled as to why every idiot these two meet have the same random quirks. Like thinking that holding a fart damages your liver and keeping bread in your truck for snacks and claiming that something that they've been told is physically impossible is 'just my opinion'. The amount of people that have these specific traits must be a severely small amount because I've never met anyone with any, separately. Yet we meet 5 or 6 characters that do exactly this, to prove they're idiots and continue a running gag that they'd have no way of knowing anything about. Minor thing but it's really been pissing me off.
No matter what niggles I have with book, I cannot emphasise enough how fun and sweet it is. It grabbed me and didn't let me go.
Spoiler
And it was nice to get a book with a solid, fully fleshed out ending. And a happy one at that.I received this ARC through Netgalley.