Amanda Fromberg's Reviews > Both Things Are True

⭐⭐ (2 stars)

This is the first of Kathleen Barber’s books I’ve read, and it unfortunately was a miss for me. I’ll concede that a big part of this is personal preference – the miscommunication trope is deeply frustrating to me and I almost always find myself yelling at the characters to just talk to each other!

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT:
-Miscommunication trope
-Second chance
-2/5 spice level

WHAT I LIKED:
-The plot was delightfully outlandish. A popular yoga instructor engaged to a wealthy cryptofinance bro who disappears after defrauding his investors? Deal me in.
-Barber really captured that gut-punch feeling of being blocked or unfriended by an ex and being completely fixated on it. Who hasn’t had an all-consuming crush, and who hasn't fallen into the internet hole of googling your ex, especially when it’s the one that got away?
-The love for Dolly Parton that runs throughout this book.
-Fern! A maybe-nefarious journalist throwing wrenches into the plot. For having relatively little time on the page, she delivered a real heat check performance.
-Rehka was my favorite character and the only person who seemed to clock how deeply toxic Vanessa’s attachment to Sam was.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:
[Light spoilers ahead]
-My overarching issue with this novel is that it recast what is a deeply toxic, codependent relationship as a romance. Vanessa’s happiness is entirely contingent on Sam, her college boyfriend she hasn’t seen in years. Any growth she has doesn’t come from within; she’s entirely reliant on external validation (particularly from Sam) and…that never changes! To that end, I don’t feel like I really know who Vanessa is aside from a yogi who loves Sam.
-I really struggled to understand why Sam was so great! Despite co-founding a revolutionary company he seems to be a total disaster who is exactly as mature as he was in college.
- Vanessa and Sam’s relationship seems to have picked up exactly where it left off – which is to say that neither of them seemed to have matured at all since they were 22.
-This book barely passed the Bechdel test. Almost every conversation Vanessa had centered around Jack or Sam.
-The side characters felt very flat. They seemed to pop into existence only when they were around Vanessa and didn’t feel like they had lives outside of talking to her about Sam.
-For a second chance romance to be successful I need to really understand what was so compelling about this couple the first time around and I was really missing that. In the highly detailed flashbacks woven into the narrative, it seems like Vanessa and Sam were deeply infatuated and then miserable. I didn’t feel excited to see what would happen next and found myself rolling my eyes and practically yelling JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER.

OTHER THOUGHTS:
[Light spoilers]
-I’m not usually a huge fan of non-linear timelines, but I think this novel could have benefitted from flashbacks that were fully broken out from the present-day timeline. They were described in detail but I think would have been more effective as actual scenes with action and dialogue.
-Based on how frequently Vanessa talks about her knee I expected it to play a bigger role in the plot. GO TO THE DOCTOR!
-Seriously, she never googled her ex boyfriend with whom she's still deeply in love? I find that so hard to believe.
-If Vanessa knows marketing and communications so well, shouldn’t she know that ignoring a journalist’s calls is a really bad idea?
-If I dated a man who disrespected Dolly Parton like that I’d dump him immediately.
-I want to go to one of Ellie’s parties.

Overall, this was a light and relatively quick read. It was too light on character development and heavy on exposition for me, and I wish I’d learned more about Vanessa and Sam’s relationship prior to the events of the book to really understand what made them so drawn to each other, and more about Vanessa as a character and not just a woman with a love interest!