Review: The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F. C. Yee

Well. I tried my best with this book. But I didn't enjoy a single thing about it. And my review will not be positive at all. Not sure how much I'll share about this book, but I must mention all those things I didn't like. Aw. And there were a lot of those things. I'm just so disappointed in this book. Giving it one star, which is rare.

I just cannot deal with how extremely bad this book was. I hated it so much at times, almost all the time. I have seen a bunch of people love this book. Saying how amazing and fun it was. Did not see this at all. I found it to be one of the worst books I have read. Ahh. And it was pretty awkward almost all the time. No fun.

But I do know that a lot of people will probably love this book. Which is fully okay. But I'm not one of those. And I'm going to share all of the reasons for why I think that this book wasn't a good one. So I'm starting with the writing. Which I found to be the very worst. I'm not sure how to describe the way it's written, so I'm going to settle with saying that it's written in a modern fan fiction type of way. Like the author was trying to write in the way that teenagers talk these days. For me this was an awful thing to read. It felt so silly and just annoying. Genie is cursing all the time, arguing with her mom at every moment, ditching her only friend at all times. And oh gosh, this book is full of yelling! Like that. All the time. Was so annoying to read and highly unreal.

I could probably talk about how much I hated the writing for hours. But I'm not going to, because I'm not able to describe it well enough. Just that it was so crappy and I was never able to overlook how it was written, so I was never able to get into the story. Not that it would have made a difference, because my hate of this book wasn't all about the writing. Sure, the writing was goddamn awful, but it was far from the only bad thing about this book. Sigh. I'm tired of this book already. I cannot wait to forget all about this.

This book tells the story of Genie Lo. A girl in high school working on getting into a big college. She is supposed to have this best friend, but we only get to see her talk to her a few times. And Genie keeps ditching her, and not even talking to her to make it right. Genie was an awful friend, to be honest. She is described as being very very tall. This book begins with a new boy in her class. And her first thought about him was how he was shorter than other boys. I guess others would enjoy that, but I didn't. At all.

This boy is Quentin. Who shows up in her classroom, jumping on the desks, claiming that she is his. And she responds by punching him in the face. Which she happens to do a lot in this book. Punching him in the face and in the stomach. It wasn't good. And she had no reason to do this, as he wasn't a creep or anything like that. Though he was a very badly written character. And I won't describe him, as I don't feel like it. But he also kept yelling all the time, like her, and he was just incredibly boring, to be fully honest.

But my issues were mostly with Genie. She wasn't written as a good person at all. With how she kept punching Quentin often. How she treated her friend. And how she behaved toward Quentin in the whole beginning of the book. Sure, he kind of stalked her, but he talked to her and explained why and such, and she kept talking awfully to him and just generally being weird. I just found this book to be so so awkward. And, oh, boy is described at one point while being wet, that his shirt is lapping at his muscles. Just, puke.

This whole book was written badly. I read someone said something about sexual tension between these two characters. And just hahaha. No. It was simply awkward. And they share one kiss, at the end of the book. Described as him kissing her, her kissing him. No heat. No nothing. So badly written. And oh, then there is the whole plot of the book. Ancient gods and demons. And with Quentin being the monkey god or whatever. Her having been reborn from being his weapon aka a blade. Uhm. What. Made no sense at all.

And then there were all those demons that these two characters have to kill all by themselves, no help. How typical. They were also written really badly. And gosh, they had such silly names. Like the baddest of the demons was called Red Boy. Just, ugh. This whole book was silly. And I'm not doing a good job of describing all of it at all. My mind is just blank. I want to be done with this book. With how extremely awful it was. And the book was full of cliches too, and not in a good way. Romance sucked. Characters sucked.

To be honest, this whole book sucked. And I don't see at all why so many people are loving it. Sure, the girl is Asian, which I loved, but it wasn't written well at all. Or written well to be diverse either. This book probably could have been amazing, had it been done a whole lot differently. But it wasn't. So yeah. I'm done with it now. I gave it a try, and ended up hugely disappointed. Thank you so much, though, Amulet Books for the ARC copy of this book. Means the most to me. I'm sorry it ended up being so awful for me.

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