Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee Book Review

Rating: -5 out of 5 bastards

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Before I start this review, I must say: I usually don’t read any other reviews of a book before I write my own, to avoid cross contamination and whatnot. I run this Bastard Reviews kitchen like the Navy, and we don’t cut chicken on the same board we cut the celery, PERIOD. But fellow Bastard Reviewer, Professor Trashraf, has informed me that there is a common refrain in the reviews that goes as such: GET A FUCKING JOB, NOAH. And I agree greatly, the main character Noah does indeed need a fucking job. And to seriously not just touch the grass, but embrace it wholeheartedly. Thank you.

Now let’s roll this summary.

Summary

Noah is 16. Noah is a transgender dude. Noah is living with his brother for the summer in Denver while his parents buy a house in California. Noah is triracial. Noah runs a Tumblr blog that apparently has 50k followers. (Fellow bastard reviewer, Perihelion, said and I quote: “I don’t believe there are even 50k people on tumblr”). In the blog, Noah makes up lies about transgender people having meetcutes in Miami, Florida. Noah thinks these lies are life changing and important. Noah is obsessed with getting a boyfriend. Noah is an asshole. And yeah, that’s it. That’s the book.

Review

(cw in review for mention of suicide)

This has to be the worst book I’ve read in recent history. It was deeply and terribly unserious while also being written to reach 100% deadass on the deadass meter.

Lemme start by saying: The main character is one of the most deeply unlikable main characters I’ve ever read. But this, in and of itself, is not really the main issue. The issue is the narrative framing the book. The main character is presented as being in the right for the majority of the book, whilst being:

1. Completely wrong.

2. Completely an asshole.

3. Completely the most exhausting person in the contiguous United States of America.

The main character, Noah, is super rude to everyone. And I mean Everyone. His parents call. He talks to them for 30 seconds. He hangs up on them. Then proceeds to spend 400 dollars of their money in one week on Ubers to go to restaurants so he can get Starbucks and bubble tea and ice cream. Because he can’t be bothered to walk 5 minutes to places. Or buy groceries to cook. Or do these things but at least be pleasant to his parents. Or do these things but learn by the end of the book that he's wrong. Or-

See below.

See what I mean. Entirely unserious behavior.

And the narrative doesn’t portray this as being incorrect behavior because he ends the book saying the below.

The... Bank of Mom and Dad.

So, nothing is learned, nothing is changed, he still thinks of his parents as ATM's despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to care about them at all and hangs up on them every phone call in the book. There at least 5 occasions where his mother calls him and he quite literally hangs up on her every time. Exhausting as hell.

Noah is rude to every person he meets. I’m not just talking standoffish either. He is hella rude to everyone he’s trying to meetcute with, he’s hella rude to Devin, a nonbinary person who is the true paramour of the book, he’s hella rude to his brother and he’s hella rude to his brother’s girlfriend.

This leads into Noah’s biggest character flaw that is not addressed at all: his hypocrisy. Noah hates his brother’s gf because the gf is white. Noah is a triracial individual mixed with Black, Asian and White. Noah in this book only crushes on and dates two separate white people (one of whom is the nonbinary person mentioned above, who is a white Cuban). Yet Noah quite literally says he hates his brother’s gf despite her doing absolutely nothing during the first 300 pages of this book. The first 300 pages the brother’s gf:

1. Invites Noah to trivia (to which he rudely snarks that he thinks trivia fucking sucks. But he’ll go if he can meet intellectual guys).

2. Is perfectly nice to Noah.

3. Gets Noah a job interview (which Noah doesn’t want because it’s at a bookstore and Noah thinks bookstores are old, stuffy and boring because he is almost straight up illiterate).

Yet Noah:

1. Makes fun of the gf for having thin lips and seems to think misogyny against her is ok because she is white.

2. Snarks that she’s treating his brother like a personal Japanese chef despite no evidence.

Yet, in the last couple of pages of the book, the brother’s gf is revealed to be a straight up transphobe despite absolutely no foreshadowing alluding to this and Noah thinks to himself AHA I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!!! Right about what? At no point before this does Noah theorize that the gf is transphobic. He just makes fun of her lips, says she needs makeup to look attractive (misogyny), rolls his eyes at her, snarks in his head about her, and is overall a big, rude asshole to her. Yet the narrative is like:

“Hey guys! It’s ok to be an asshole to people because they probably were transphobes anyway! Even though you didn’t know that, or suspect it whatsoever, it doesn’t matter! If you don’t like somebody, it WILL be revealed that they are a big ol’ bigot! It is perfectly fine to be extremely rude to people you do not fucking know! If that Starbucks worker fucks up your cold foam, suplex them through the fucking floor! If that Walmart worker is one minute late with your pickup order, straight up deck them in the face! If you see someone having a panic attack, ask them about their suicide attempt!” (This last one actually happened in the book).

Basically, as I’ve prefaced, the ultimate problem with this book is that the narrative presents Noah as right roughly 90 percent of the time. And even when he gets called out, the narrative makes these callouts usually about things that Noah hasn’t done wrong. Or Noah says to himself, “I know she’s right BUT-” and refutes the callout in his mind. Therefore, you get 378 pages of a book where the main character does not learn, grow or evolve. He stays the same from page 1 to page 378. The even bigger issue is, when you call this out, it would appear the author thinks this makes you a transphobe because, according to the author, the problem is that: “Trans kids don’t owe it to you to “earn” a happy ending by being palatable to you.”

This is very disingenuous rhetoric.

Gonna get serious here for a second.

When people speak about palatability and respectability in the context of minorities- this is based on the idea that minorities should not have to do more to be accepted in our wider society. This means that a trans person should not have to dress a certain way to be acceptable/ "pass" as the gender they are. Or in the context of say, race, a black person shouldn’t have to speak a certain way to be acceptable. Minorities should not have to go above and beyond in life to be able to live life normally and freely.

I, as a black person, should not have to wear slacks to work, while my white coworkers wear leggings. I should not be told, when I wear a pair of flowy and not stiff as shit slacks, that I’m STILL not professional enough and get dinged during a performance review. While the lady in leggings just lives her life. Either we all get treated equally, or nothing at all, is what it should be.

So, in the context of this book, to take an argument like this regarding palatability and respectability and turn it into something where to you it just means: a transgender person should be able to be extremely rude to everyone including lesbians and other trans people, means you’re taking a legitimate argument and turning it into something else to escape accountability.

Someone says the main character is really rude and now you’re hiding the character behind 8 layers of identity instead of accepting that: people do not hate the character of Noah because he isn’t palatable. People do not hate the character of Noah because he isn’t respectable. People hate the character of Noah because he goes through the book mentally and verbally berating other characters and receives no comeuppance for it and the narrative treats him as righteous.

Nobody is saying that Noah has to earn a happy ending. Nobody is saying Noah deserves misery. What’s being said is that Noah inflicts misery wherever he goes in this book. On his parents, on his brother, on his boyfriend ( the bf inflicts misery as well obviously, but at least he is presented as wrong in a narrative sense), on his next significant other, on his best friend. And he gets away with it. And never learns that any of that is wrong.

Had this book been a satire or had that been the point, it may have worked. The issue here is that this book is a self-insert fanfic for the author. This is part of a slate of books where there is a world envisioned where people can be as rude and nasty as possible and that nobody can say anything to them about it. It’s folks living out the fantasy where they get to be the bully, the big man on campus, the alpha, the omega, THE SUPREME MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH

OK, I’m clearly not being serious anymore. But you get what I mean.

No you do not owe anybody anything. But you can't just walk through life being a big ol' asshole.

This review could be super long so I’m just gonna end it right about here, because we could really go through every page as a class and tear this book up for real. But the moral of the story is: The Book Sucks. It’s poorly written, has a hypocritical and unlikable protagonist and it upset me and my homegirls, homeboys and homebros.

I’m gonna give it a negative 5 misogynistic main characters out of 5 main characters that are 16 years old and spend 400 dollars in a week on Starbucks and boba tea, while saying they hate capitalism when a small business owner asks them not to let people make illegal returns. I do not know how this book made it through agenting, rounds of editing and publishing but lets hang it up and send it back to the ol’ 400 dollar drawing board.

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Bonus material! Below are some more pages that tickled me: