I thought that I did my research well, and bought this book thinking I would really like it. It was not what I had expected and many of the stories just angered me. I don’t even want this book on my shelves — it upsets me this much.

One of the book blurb quotes even says:

I’m surprised by how successful this was. I didn’t even finish it.

When I first saw this I thought it was supposed to be witty and funny, because what author or publisher would willingly put a negative comment on their book? It had to have been done sarcastically — boy was I wrong. Now I’m thinking that they ran out positive quotes and just needed to add in one more quote to fill the page and this one was randomly picked.

Ok, so I have bitched enough about the fact that I did not enjoy this book, but I have not provided you reasons why. Here is why I disliked Not That Kind of Girl:

(1) The introduction is strong and has promise, it sets up the book as being a story that “deserves to be told”. Then you carry on reading only to discover the things worth telling are apparently an email she wrote to a boy, stories about the times she shared a bed with men she didn’t have sex with, food journal entries from when she used to count calories, and a list of things in her purse.

(2) Did not gain any kind of insight or anything of value from reading this

(3) Humour was OK, but mostly disturbing when you stop and think about what is being joked about

(4) The sexual encounters that she explains are not healthy, they’re rapey. And rather than explicitly saying something helpful to readers like “This is wrong. If this has happened to you, talk to someone” it’s shrugged off and twisted into a joke. Here are two examples of sexual encounters, you tell me if you’d joke about this:

“I told him “I have to pee.” [He] leads me to the parking lot. I tell him to look away. I pull down my tights to pee, and he jams a few of his fingers inside me, like he’s trying to plug me up.”

“I look onto the floor…and see that he’s taken off the condom…Why does he think it’s okay to take it off? Did I ask him to put one on?…I tell him he has to put the condom back on…Now we’re across the room, our bodies in a new formation. I tip my head back as far as it will go. And up, in my roommate’s tree, I see another condom. Or was it the same condom. A condom that isn’t on him and maybe never was.”

I wanted to stop reading half way through, but I bought the book and I wanted to complete it. I wanted to know if it got better. I kept thinking “it will get better — don’t give up, just read the next part. So many people loved this book, it has to get better.”

It didn’t.

I have not been this disappointed in a book for a long time. Actually, I don’t recall the last time I felt this disappointed in a book.

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Not That Kind of Girl - Likewise Book Reviews

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