This Is All Your Fault by Aminah Mae Safi

I have never been more excited in my life. 'this smart and voice-driven YA novel follows three young women determined to save their indie bookstore' Review to come / 3 stars (dropped to 2 upon seeing Empire Records) Seeking: a punk gothic library-themed indie bookstore where i can fall in love AND make unlikely friendships Multiple reviewers ( celia and sarah) have written that this is on the brink of plagiarizing the movie Empire Records, which i have never seen. This is the 87th example of an incomprehensible lengthy internal monologue like that.Īnd don’t even get me started on the Brock Harvey celebrity author don’t-meet-your-heroes plotline, which started out clichéd as hell and finished.inexplicably. There were THREE romance subplots and a BREAKUP and NONE of them are properly given time.īut instead, at the literal climax of the book, one character spends one and a half pages thinking about everyone’s phone cases and whether she needs one. It didn’t tell me any of the things I wanted it to and I just wanted to yell DO WHAT MAKES SENSE AND IS ALSO INTERESTING FUN AND/OR EXCITING.PLEASE I BEG OF YOU…Īll of the characterization was so telly not showy, which led to really repetitive scenes.Rinn (the good-girl booktuber) is Filming. This feels more like a first draft than an ARC. So who better to save it than three quirky cool girls, am I right.Įxcept that the first two thirds (TWO!!! THIRDS!!!!) is just them finding out that the bookstore is failing, so the plot feels super lopsided and almost deus ex machina-y and lame. This Is All Your Fault is about a ragtag group of teen girls (and also boys, but they are continually just forgotten about, even as they exist in the same building as the aforementioned girls) who work in a bookstore and then must save the bookstore because that quirky cool bookstore is closing. Then I kept reading, and it kept disappointing me, and it became a generous 3.Īnd then I had the miraculous experience that is watching Empire Records, and we all boarded the rating train straight to Twosville. This book ripped off Empire Records, and it didn’t even do that good of a job.īefore reading this, I had never seen Empire Records, and I felt like this could be a 4.5 star read. Not an adaptation of this book, which is not out yet, but somehow already exists. If you feel at all compelled to read this book, I must recommend you watch a movie instead.

I am about to say something that I have never, ever said before:

This Is All Your Fault by Aminah Mae Safi