Book 931: Book Boyfriend – Kris Ripper

After this landed in my inbox as part of a larger round-up of upcoming releases by Carina/Harlequin releases I jumped to request it.* Who doesn’t want to read a book about books and falling in love around the publication of a book?! It’s basically catnip for book bloggers 😀

Unfortunately, the premise was better in my head than the execution in reality. That’s not saying Ripper didn’t have two wonderful characters and a decent story, it just was a struggle to get into and stay engaged with until the very end.

This is the story of PK, a hopeless romantic who doesn’t know how to process/share his feelings (I think he may be on the Autism spectrum, but it’s never explicitly stated), and Art, his best friend who just came out of a bad break up and crashes with him to try and get their life back together.

For me, the biggest letdown was the writing—you can only do so much text speak and internal dialogue before it starts to get old and it starts to get annoying, and this book reached that point WAY too soon. I 100% get and understand that Ripper was trying to put us in PK’s mindset of being scattered and overwhelmed and living in his head more than the real world, but it just didn’t work and was almost enough to make me stop reading.

Art loved romances. I’d never read an actual romance novel until Art introduced them to me in college, and then? I loved them. Not that I wanted to write them, but I couldn’t stop reading his whole bookshelf because it opened this world of people having all these feelings, like I could get this contact high from reading about other people’s intensity. It made me feel good. It made me feel . . . maybe a little voyeuristic, but also a little like I understood Art better. He had so many thoughts and feelings about stuff, and these books were my way of getting what that felt like in his head.

In my head? Feelings were this loud, clanging, confused mass of noise. But for Art, feelings were colors and textures, things he could make sense of, could sort and organize. What would he see, if he read my book? Would he see chaos or order? Would he see me, or himself, or both of us, or neither of us? (Chapter 10)

This was unfortunate because I think quite a few people will give up on the book before it shifts in the second half and becomes so much better. A lot of this was PK having to have real adult conversations with multiple people after seriously screwing up his chances with Art and it just was better written. I honestly don’t know if PK is a neurodiverse character, but it sure felt like everyone was tiptoeing around it and that he might’ve been. It could’ve been an authorial choice, not to tell us and I respect that, but I feel like if it were acknowledged or even more explicitly discussed it might’ve helped me get into the book a lot sooner than I did.

All of this being said I was 100% pulled into the fantasy that PK had going on in his head and wanted to believe it so much, but as the book approached the climactic scene and Art found out everything the pressure in my chest was so painful because I knew it couldn’t be any other way. It just hurt me so much to see them both get hurt and to have to grow from it and then to find out they were both carrying a torch for all those years, OMG swoon.

I’m not a depressive type person. Not that I never felt sad, just that I wasn’t deep enough to be depressed, not really. I had simple emotions. Basic emotions. If you were going to compare my, like, emotional geography to an organism, it would have more than one cell? But not by much. It’d be early on in the evolution of organisms.

My ability to feel stuff was a creature that hadn’t dragged itself out of the primordial ooze yet. (Chapter 16)

However, I want to end with a highlight. Ripper did such a wonderful job of writing non-traditional characters and really pushed me outside of my normal cis-white (for the most part) MM Romance novels and I very much enjoyed it. From Wade and Ray’s beautifully queer relationship to Art’s transition to using they/them pronouns to the scene when Art painted PK’s nails and he immediately became obsessed with them and lost hours staring at the pretty holographic glitter, there were so many moments of brightness and wonderfulness that Ripper clearly has talent, ze just got a little bit in their won way. Somewhat, but totally unrelated, I love that ze uses non-he/she/they pronouns. I’ve been obsessed with alternatives since I read about “per” in Woman on the Edge of Time almost a decade-and-a-half ago.

Recommendation: I’m torn between read it and pass—there are some definite gems, but it might be too much of a slog for some people. PK and Art are wonderful characters and so many of the minor characters were also fun and well written. I struggled mostly with the over-internalized dialogue but understand why Ripper did it. The last few chapters when PK had to make big leaps forward emotionally saved the novel and bumped my rating up. I’ll probably check out Ripper again in the future, but I won’t seek out zir works.

*I received a copy of Book Boyfriend via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “It all started when Art—Art’s, like, my best friend or whatever—turned up on my doorstep, in the rain crying.”

Closing Line: “Which is what we did. We went home. Our home. together.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Book Boyfriend
“Anyway, since I was like fourteen or something, writing had been the place I went when reality let me down, and discovering that in terms of Art dating me, I wasn’t just starting at zero, but in the negatives, was definitely a let-down. Since haphazardly trolling the web hadn’t helped, I might as well funnel some of my frustration into words.” (Chapter 6)

“Watching him with his folks really . . . bummed me out. Like. You can know someone doesn’t have a lot of regard for his parents but seeing it in action was another thing, and it wasn’t just one way. I’d thought it was harsh because it seemed like Wade’s parents adored him, but the more I stood around awkwardly pretending Wade and I were cute gay boyfriends (technically both of us were obviously, like, pansexual, but I didn’t think the nuances would make a difference to his great-aunt Maryanne), the more I realized he was right. This whole night might as well have been a staged performance, with us as the unpaid actors.” (Chapter 15)

“He waved a hand. ‘Any interesting books coming out? Is that the correct question? I’m not used to small talk with people I actually know’
I made a face at him. ‘ Then why are you pretending to care about my work?’
‘God, I’m not pretending at all! I thought that was the good thing about small talk. You don’t really have to pretend you care. Small talk is the . . . garlic powder of conversation. You sprinkle it in everywhere because it can’t hurt, but no one expects it to provide more than a pleasant backdrop for the things that matter.'” (Chapter 19)