I’ve been watching ScreenRant’s ‘Honest Trailers’ for years now. It is a video about a movie where they explain the movie but with witty, sarcastic, and ingenious remarks of their own. Just a few days ago, though, I came across another channel ‘Only Desi’ where the Indian guy revisits old, popular Bollywood movies and tears them apart with sharp and relentless roasting humour. That’s how I would like to review this book: with a mixture of ‘Honest Trailers’ and Only Desi Revisits’, because it’s a story that deserves such a light-hearted and comic review. So, here goes nothing.
Meet Lily, whose last name is Blossom, and middle name Rose. She hates her name but loves garden. One day she’s at the edge of a rooftop, when an angry man thunders his way in and start beating up a chair, you know because he’s angry. That impresses Lily, who is also impressed with his biceps that don’t fit his shirt. Meet Ryle, a neurosurgeon with a terrible temper, who has a voice like butter but which still makes Lily vibrate on the inside. They start asking each other questions, like what are you doing on the roof and why did you beat up a chair? For their answers, they devise something called ‘NAKED TRUTHS’: where you can say whatever you’re feeling, without caring if it’s dumb, cringy, hurtful, or straight out stupid. But it gets the work done, it’s a beginning of a romantic relationship between a girl who loves gardens and hates her name and an elder doctor who clearly fails to give any such impressions.
It is Boston, where everything is better, since Lily’s first boyfriend, a homeless guy, tells him when he leaves her after having sex with her and her parents beating the hell out of him. But don’t worry, Atlas, the homeless guy, now owns a restaurant and still loves Lily; don’t think about how that happened. But Lily has moved on now. She opens a floral shop, you know because her name includes Rose and Blossom, and a lady comes and start working there, because there was a sign outside ‘Need Help’. Meet Allyssa, a super-rich woman because she married a super-rich guy who sells apps to Apple and makes millions, but still wears a onesie to get a free glass of bear.
But wait, there’s more: Allyssa is Ryle’s sister, and she doesn’t want her boss, Lily, who doesn’t pay her more than $10 an hour but she never cashes the cheque anyways because you know she’s rich, to marry his fuck-boi brother who only wants to satisfy his needs and doesn’t want a relationship. But Lily is different, and Ryle falls in love in her. Although he mostly begs for sex when with her, literally, and she refuses him sex because she wants a trial version where there will be no sex – you know, because that’s how relationships work.
But Lily has a weakness: scrubs. So, when Ryle comes from his eighteen-hour surgery, which he himself mentions, you know because he’s a surgeon, Lily can’t stop her horniness and talks to herself in italics ‘he’s wearing scrubs, Jesus’. After they fuck, a lot, he begins to show his true colours, which he also showed the first time they met: he starts beating Lily and then apologize for it. He beats her again, and then apologizes, and again, and apologizes – fuck this shit. Now Lily understands how her mother didn’t leave her father, even though it was abusive as hell, and she complained to Ellen DeGeneres about it in her journals – because, you love the person and you don’t think it was that bad. Which it clearly was, you have stitches from it.
It’s a story of abusive relationships, where the abuse continues because no one leaves, and about cringy, horny people who want to fuck, and about naked truths, which is the worst way to tell anything. But there are also MAJOR PLOTTWISTS, that turn the story into a literal roller-coaster ride, where you never know what might happen next. Atlas runs back into Lily’s life, whom I at point figured would be Ryle’s brother, but Ryle had shot his brother in an early age – wow. Jokes aside though, I had a really fun time reading this novel and accepting it for what it is.
It’s not the worlds of Dostoyevsky, Beckett, Woolf, or Kundera, but a fantastical, audience pleasing, story-selling novel about lay people with anger issues and indecision problem, for lay people who are too reality-bound to ever live a story like this. But damn fun though! Now I get why Hoover rules for those too obsessed people with fairy-tales and narcissism.
Ratings: 4/5 **** October 15, 2022_