4,0 sur 5 étoiles
A wonderful, soft, sweet, funny romance with loin-achingly tender love scenes
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 1 février 2019
I don't even know where to start with this review.
With a confession, I think. I'm one of the Flamethrowers, and we've been relentlessly demanding 'more more more, please more' since the Hating Game was released.
The Hating Game is a transcendent book that is so achingly perfect and sweet that your book hangover will last for months, not days. Sally’s writing is a delicious hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows in front of an open fire, snuggled up warm and cosy while a snowstorm shrieks around you.
I confess; I was worried. All the way along we’ve exclaimed and squee-ed, expressed our love for her writing and our undying impatience for more more MORE, but secretly, I was a tiny bit afraid: I was a tiny bit afraid that after the cast-iron emotional bond I felt with Josh and Lucy, that I wouldn’t be able to engage with Tom and Darcy. I read the blurb and worried about Jamie (her twin brother). I worried about how Sally could take the ‘handyman’ trope and put her own unique spin on it to draw me in. I was concerned that Tom was a 2 dimensional trope without the strength and vulnerability of Joshua Templeton. I read the teaser snippet bar scene and fretted that I’d get annoyed by snarky Darcy. Even the title worried me: 99% Mine: I couldn’t get my mind to understand the concept at all.
Even so, Sally’s writing is so richly evocative that it draws you in and anchors you in the world she so wonderfully builds with her colourful metaphors, humorous pokes at cliché tropes, honest, unflinching and realistic introspection and loin-achingly erotic romance that leaves the reader feeling…. Things. Erotic scenes that are somehow both graphic and explicit without being crude or distasteful. The reader doesn’t need to glance over their shoulder worrying that someone is seeing filthy words on the page. Sally’s love scenes are warm and tender and everything you want in a romance book. She tiptoes the line perfectly between euphemistic and just vague enough to be tasteful whilst still managing to convey with sensual explication exactly what the characters are doing and feeling. This is a skill I don’t think the author realises she has. Too many erotic scenes rely on crude words. Sally’s books are too soft, too sweet for crude and explicit scenes, but would be immeasurably less satisfying by the romance novel equivalent of ‘fade to black’ – blanking out the actual act and moving the story on to the ‘morning after’.
Having been so invested in ‘The Hating Game’, I immediately read the bonus epilogue first, and almost cried at how absolutely perfectly it ties everything up in a neat little parcel. With call backs to emotional anchors scattered throughout the text, THE epilogue was the most perfect ending to a romance novel I’ve ever read. It also neatly closes the book on Lucy and Josh in a way that is wonderful. As a reader, I am happy to leave Josh and Lucy behind now. They had their story and got their perfect HEA, and the epilogue dots most of the I’s and crosses the majority of the t’s in a profoundly satisfying way that left just enough unsaid to leave the reader with some food for thought and things to ponder on.
Then with some trepidation I tucked my feelings about Lucy and Josh back into my chest, turned to the beginning of the book, and dived into Darcy and Tom. My fears were absolutely unfounded. The relationship between Darcy and Tom is worlds away from Josh and Lucy, but Sally’s writing is so beguiling that the reader is drawn inexorably into this new world and I absolutely adored it.
Instead of being annoyed by Darcy, like I thought I might be, I empathised with her and respected her strength and resilience. Sally doesn’t shy away from having her characters be brutally honest about themselves and their shortcomings and I like this – the characters are relatable and so real. Tom wasn’t the cookie-cutter-perfect 2D romance-man-candy. He was a complex character with a complicated backstory that was woven throughout the plot. Sally seems to have a gift for so effortlessly weaving the strands of story together in such a way that nothing feels forced or expository.
Darcy’s twin brother was a factor I was kinda dreading, but in the end their relationship was exactly the kind of love-hate relationships that siblings have, and I breathed an audible sigh of relief. I’m not even a twin, but I can see so much of the sibling battles, one-up-man-ship and sibling judgementalism that I deal with in my own sibling-having life, but with the ultimate truth that you will always love each other and be there for each other when it counts.
The ‘handyman’ trope was handled so well – I really liked that Darcy got stuck in and refused to be side-lined. I liked that the ‘supporting characters’ were carbon copies of every tradesman I’ve ever encountered. Sally’s writing just feels so authentic it’s like I’m actually there, watching.
I was about 10% into the book when I started understanding the ‘99% mine’ concept. It was woven throughout Darcy’s narrative and in the context, made total and complete sense. It was perfect, in fact, when you take in the larger picture and backstory of Darcy, Jamie and Tom. Heh. Perfect.
This book was so completely different in both tone and theme from Sally’s debut novel, but it's absolutely undeniably her writing – all the turns of phrase, clever, colourful analogies and metaphors, the inner voice of Darcy, the way casual mannerisms like shrugs and arm gestures are written in such a way as to not distract from the prose, but to bring to life a vivid mental image. I loved 99% every bit as much as I loved THG, but in a myriad of subtly different ways. The characterisations are so expertly crafted that each ‘main character’ is a completely unique and individual person. They aren’t ‘variations on a theme’ or a ‘type’ – some authors aim their stories at specific types of reader, so all the female characters broadly fall into certain categories. This isn’t always a bad thing, but I love how strong and vibrant Sally’s characters are, and how you’d know them immediately if you met them.
She also manages to both embrace and poke gentle fun at cliché tropes in such a way that you don’t feel like you’re being chided for reading a trope-heavy romance novel, but the author acknowledges the tropes and still manages to turn them into something realistic and fun.
I deliberately wanted this to be a spoiler-free review, but I could write pages on all the tiny things I loved about this book. This time around, Sally included the epilogue for the book, and, just like THG, it answers lingering questions and leaves the reader happy and satisfied but still with some things left to the imagination.
99% isn’t a ‘worthy follow up novel’ to the surprise hit of The Hating Game. It’s a wonderful, beautifully crafted novel in its own right that should absolutely be read and judged on its own merit, not compared to THG.
The book is also edited very well – I didn’t notice a single spelling error.
As a non-spoiler-y aside, I really want some underswears. Anyone know where I can get some?
3 personnes ont trouvé cela utile
