[REVIEW] Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyevâs âStrange Deaths of the Last Romanticâ
I refuse to finish this book, but Iâll review it anyway, only to warn people not to read it. Itâs terrible. Iâll start with the only good thing in this book, the very thing that made me choose it in NetGalleyâs shelves: the initial idea of it. From the summary, it sounded like an interesting thriller with a boring heterosexual romance I could ignore, or even grow into liking a bit. A tiny little bit.Â
I couldnât have been more wrong. First of all, Adam, the main character, is boring. So boring and dull it hurts: he isnât funny, nor he is mysterious, nor caring and he does passes as sweet (or, at least, itâs what the author expects to portray), but in a way thatâs just creepy.Â
Besides, I canât help but add that the book and its protagonist are painfully sexist. Iâm going to have a wild guess that the author is the same. Iâll try to list everything wrong that Iâve picked on this book within only 14% of it.
The first moment where Adam claims he became a romantic was when he played a prank on Anna, one of his classmates, and he almost died. He hated her guts, but after that, she suddenly became beautiful in his eyes.
Weâll still talk about poor Anna for a little while. The boys hate her, and they are disgustingly and excessively violent, to the point where Adam tells that, during her birthday party, there was piñata and their response was to pretend the piñata was Anna herself, and they beat it up. No, youâre not hearing it wrong. A bunch of fourth grade boys were in a party anf fantasizing about beating their classmate up, quite literally like a piñata.
Then, as if just that wasnât enough, the boys felt like playing a prank on Anna would be fun, so one of them suggests putting a dead bird next to her lunchbox, and Adam not only supports it, but suggests that they also paint the animalâs corpse with red paint theyâd steal from the art teacherâs office! Poor Anna, who wasnât paying attention at the time, took a bite of the bird, and started to choke. For a moment, Iâd assumed heâd feel guilt when he said âI thought we--no, I-- had killed herâ, but then, he says âhe saw the tragedy of his own existenceâ and that he âemerged out of the chaos a new creation, a new manâ. Because of course, that situation was about him.
Itâs also worth saying that he kept describing the lunch lady as âlargeâ and talking about her performing the Heimlich maneuver on Anna as if it was some kind of sick joke. Heâd almost killed his classmate, but the only time he refers to her as âpoor Annaâ is when âin between abdominal thrusts, poor Anna struggled to break free from the large womanâs embraceâ.Â
Annaâs parents were absolutely okay with what happened! Itâs actually written in the book that during the meeting, her father spent the entire time winking and smiling his way! And after that, he took Adam aside and told him that Anna âtalked a lot about him at homeâ, and said the line that Adam described as âprobably the best explanation of feminine psychology he had ever heardâ, finding it âso simple, and yet so profound.â
âIf she hates you, she hates you for not loving her back.â That was it. He said it to the boy whoâd just almost killed his daughter. Itâs so disgusting, the implication that, when women say no, or show that theyâre repelled, itâs because theyâre playing hard to get or something amongst those lines. If someone seems to hate you, just leave them alone!Â
And, unfortunately, this isnât the last sexist line in the book. Soon after, out of Adamâs POV, which was a relief to me before I realised that the main character was different, but the author who was writing him remained, I found the lines:
âAs for Lilyanne, she could never do anything wrong in her fatherâs eyes. From the first time he looked into her eyes, he knew heâd hold her tiny hands until she grew into adulthood while his own aged with wrinkles. There was nothing he wouldnât do for his two girls. From cameras to tracking devices, from expensive security systems to thorough background checks on every babysitter, Mr. Beloshinski oversaw it all. Some perceived him as paranoid; he preferred to see himself as being intelligently cautious.â
â...her husband refused to let her workâÂ
âshe learned not to argue with her husbandâÂ
Besides the several sexist parts and plot points, the characters felt inconsistent to me, such as Adam revealing that heâs finally realised life wasnât fair after being beaten up by the man who adopted him, which would be fair if, before that, he hadnât lost his mother, spent weeks in a coma, and almost killed Anna. I find this very enough for one to notice the unfairness of life. Adamâs also extremely cocky, acting like a child genius despite being one of the most boring characters Iâve ever seen, a creepy, sexist asshole who cannot deal with a ânoâ as answer to save his life--not that saving his life is something heâd need, all things considered--and a bully. Heâs immature as fuck a character who, as the writing style suggests, was supposed to be the nerdy one who reads a lot and has a higher level of comprehension than his peers.
In conclusion, this book has no redeeming qualities. The only thing that kept me going was this review, and not even that kept me going for long. Iâm never even getting near anything by Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev again, ever.
