This book was nearly insufferable. It starts out with a strong plot, and I was drawn into the documentary-level detail, but I didn't foresee how off the rails it would go. After part 1, where heroine discovered her boyfriend is a secret conspiracy theorist, and part 2, which flashes back to their meet-cute, super plot twist comes along and twists the plot so severely there is no longer any plot. Then we get an absolutely interminable section where heroine just wanders around. At one point she decides to go on a series of 12 fake dates, during each of which she pretends to be a different stereotyped sign of the zodiac. I felt like I was reading some Japanese fiction where any random thing might happen next, and when things get like that, I just get like WHY!?!?!

And yes, you can totally convince me that I'm reading it on entirely the wrong level, and that all my complaints are "the point." Nevertheless, complaints they are. ( )

A bizarre yet consistently compelling read that ultimately disappoints. ( )

Quite a book. Very well written, extremely self-referential. A seemless alchemy of the *new now* effortlessly writing in a voice of our very present: online news and information, social media, texting, emailing, online dating. It’s a jarringly accurate commentary on the fractured narcissism of our present online state of affairs seeping into our quotidian. For an unlikable protagonist, she was pretty likable. Which seems a neat trick. Like how one can loath and exalt oneself. It was dense in a way—The sentences were good enough not to rush through, but I still had a feeling of gobbling it down. But then left a bit empty and befuddled at the end. I’m not sure if I was supposed to understand something more of it. Maybe, to quote the final sentence, that was a part of the point?

Thought provoking and timely, yet exhausting and pretentious... which, being that this is a novel about the internet, is to be expected. ( )

Wanted to like this much more than I did. The writing was very “high on its own supply” which I can appreciate was at least partly intentional. The story spun away from its initial premise pretty early, and I didn’t love where the plot went (or, maybe more accurately, didn’t go). The voice was definitely fresh and modern but seemed overly impressed with itself at the same time. I almost never DNF, plus this book is short and I’m a fast reader, but once I did finish, I was thinking “what’s the point?”

Recently read Detransition, Baby, which I’d recommend as an alternative for this book, as it has a decidedly modern voice but a truly compelling plot and sympathetic characters. ( )