Trying to read casey mcquinston's 'the pairing' and I finally realised what has been bugging me about their writing especially in 'i kissed shara wheeler' but 'one last stop' as well, something that is evident in 'the pairing', and it's that mcquinston writes places and people like they're people in a postcard. Kit and Theo have been travelling for 3 cities by now, and despite Theo's superior nose or something they have never commented on how foul smelling Paris can be, how grey it looks, how crowded it usually is, no, everything is peach coloured, beautiful and picturesque. Of course the Italian tour guide is a 'ciao bellissimo' stereotype, of course everyone is beautiful and suave, of course nobody is sweating their asses off, this is not, after all, a book based around travelling, because if it were, you'd have to actually put details that would destroy the image of a picture perfect world. (The precision used for describing food only serves to accentuate this problem.) Except that this willingness to overuse stereotypes and dwell in perfect cities evokes in me the same annoyance as when a character in sarah wheeler was described as a 'granola bar lesbian'. Nothing is true and the good parts regarding characters and gender and queerness are not enough to save the boat