Book Review: "Disappoint Me" by Nicola Dinan

Who can blame me for getting another Kindle book on the cheap? This is one of those books where I don't really read too much into what the book is going to be about, I just have a go at it and see. This book may not be the most brilliant thing ever written but it is definitely up there as being pretty interesting. I finished the whole book in one sitting and yet, I felt like it was at least, missing something. The main concerns I had about this book is the lack of atmosphere and the great amount of side characters, many of whom did not add to the storyline in any meaningful way. However, the main threads of the story and its primary characters was intersting enough to keep me reading for a long while.

Max is a transwoman who meets a man called Vincent after recently breaking up with a man named Arthur (Arthur seems like quite the asshole when you read the book). But before this, she's already fallen down the stairs at a NYE party despite not being drunk and she's been accused of jealousy from others. I'm not going to lie, the first chapter or so introduces a lot of characters who have few things that make their characters unique and so, it is easy to get mixed up between them when they are all so similar. Max however, is a great hook character that we can definitely be on the side of as she moves through the world. The writing is quite well paced despite not having much atmosphere - I enjoyed learning about Max and her cultural background through the stories of flashbacks she told now and again.

When she meets Vincent, he seems like a great man and not an asshole like Arthur. However, from the very first meeting I constantly felt like there was something off about him. Part of the book is narrated by him and this part is set some ten or so years before Max's narrative. It tells the story of a trip he takes abroad in which he becomed enamoured with a woman named Alex - only for his friend, Fred to meet her as well and the whole thing kind of goes a bit sideways. I'm not going to lie, Fred is perhaps the most unlikeable character in the whole book and that's before you find out the things he's done.

I think the author definitely does a good job at presenting us with many different types of people but I just think there are too many of them. Every single person seems to need a partner, an ex, a family, a best friend and so on and so forth. This means that certain characters, perhaps like Fred, aren't fleshed out as much and we rely on snapshots of their behaviour rather than the full picture of things. I would be quite interested to read a book purely about Vincent and Fred growing up in the same way I'd love to read a sequel book on Max after the events of the book. That would be very interesting in expanding the world of the text.

There's another side story concerning Max's brother, Jamie, in which his ex-girlfriend becomes pregnant and the baby is his. At first, she plans on keeping it and they are going to co-parent but plans for that change very quickly. I think that is what this book is truly about: changing plans. This book explores how things learnt change the course of our lives in ways we couldn't imagine before. When we meet Vincent, we think he's pretty alright for Max but then, as we start to learn more about his past, that becomes less and less true by the second.

All in all, the story is definitely interesting and I would again, love to have this world explored more with sequel books (though I don't think that is going to happen). The ending of the book is extremely important and yet, there is something left uncertain about it. It seems to represent that life may not actually be about closure at all, but instead it seems to be about why we make certain decisions to stay, or to leave.