ropalimpia 's review for:

The Regrets by Amy Bonnaffons

DID NOT FINISH: 33%

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I liked it at first in a guilty pleasure kind of way. I'm not really someone who reads romance. I'm not big on obvious, tropey writing, but I wanted to give this one a chance. I love Thomas's character. He's a smarmy pseudo-intellectual asshole, and that's fun. He has an interesting backstory, an interesting motive, an interesting personality. He's someone I wanted to stick around with for a while. After his section is over, though (which I was hoping it wouldn't be. I kind of wanted the whole story to be told from his perspective), here comes Rachel. She's a reference librarian, and she acts like a reference librarian, which is to say that she's boring. She's brought into the story in a way that feels completely unbalanced. Thomas is fantastical, mystical, narcissistic, borderline flamboyant. Rachel is dry and has no backstory to be heard of except that she experiments with love. That's it. When you want to switch to a different character, you have to make me want to stick with this new character after tearing me away from the better one. Give me a reason to like Rachel. She could be the opposite of him. The story makes reference to them having "complementary weirdnesses." Rachel is NOT weird, no matter how much Bonnafons wants to convince us that she's weird. Is she a little serious? Yeah. Is that weird? Haha, no, it's not. What's weird is that she considers herself to be weird. 

Anyway, I decided I couldn't continue when Rachel had her little outing with her very diverse group of friends, as if Bonnafons were somehow trying to make up for her two very white protagonists. Agh.