Giulia's Reviews > Pretending

"Guilt is the luxury of the powerful."

TW: rape, emotional abuse, slut-shaming, anxiety, catfishing, victim blaming, sexual assault, PTSD, trauma, fat-phobia

Unpopular Opinion Time 🐸☕️

Actual rating: 2.5 ⭐️

Empowering, remarkable, important.

Those are three adjectives with which I would describe Pretending to you.
And I truly cannot stress this enough. The messages this book offered are important and need to be internalized by every single soul walking this Earth.

But I also have to be honest and I cannot hide to you that Pretending left me a bit (or a lot, actually) disappointed.

I have always thoroughly and unquestionably enjoyed Holly Bourne’s novels. And this one was no different.
This book tackled so many issues and topics it is hard to properly highlight everything.

Let me give it a try.

April is a woman. A woman with a personality, and fears and hopes and doubts and trauma. She has been finding it hard to meet a partner and she believes that’s because of who she is as a person. After yet another heartbreak she decides to tailor herself so to be more pleasing to men; to not be “too much” so to be desirable. She then becomes Gretel and catfishes somebody with this new, cool and polished (and totally not real) version of her.
So there is a commentary regarding one’s identity and the self-doubts and struggles one goes through both when dating and simply when living. As well as the double standards specifically reserved for women when it comes to sex and emotions.

April is thirty-three. Time is ticking and she is still not married; she does not have kids. She is not in a stable relationship.
So there is a commentary regarding how today’s society is pushing us all to date, to be with somebody, to have children and follow that one path, the only acceptable path, of dating-marrying-having-children in a very specific and strict timespan.

April has been raped. She has trauma, she has anxiety, she has been sexually assaulted by her ex boyfriend and now she has baggage.
So there is a commentary regarding rape culture, sexual assault and harassment in general. How society deals with it (or does not deal with it) and how people react to that, and live and survive after that.

It was an adult contemporary both insightful and striking. It was at times emotional to read, but it was still enjoyable and important.
Many important topics were tackled within a feminist approach.

But this would not be a Rather Random Review™️ if I were not here to complain.
So, up until the 60% mark everything was going smoothly. I thought the plot (even if weak) was interesting specifically because of the commentaries offered.
Little did I know that things were about to change.

As always, and this happens to me every single time I read a Holly Bourne novel, I personally thought the last third of the book was too preachy and the (vital and amazing) messages were repeated too much and too often.
This always lowers my overall enjoyment of Holly Bourne’s books as the nail gets hit way too much on its head and everything loses its power and bite.

By being repeated so much, the messages lacked nuance. It was a bit too much spoon fed for my likings. It is almost academic, didactic. Some parts read like they were the first words in a class about feminism and sexual assault; for example, the scene where the concept of “rape spectrum” is tackled seemed to be a teacher’s speech more than an actual discussion.
So the last third was just too school-like for me, and I did not particularly enjoy that. All the wonderful truths that were peppered throughout the book got condensed and repeated ad nauseam in the end, and I just couldn’t deal with it anymore as everything lost its power and weight.

And my frustration did nothing but grow especially because the ending itself was predictable and too much like a fairytale – hence destroying all the powerful messages offered before.

After all the feminist discussions, the self-discovery, the stress given to the importance of self-love of self-respect and of one’s identity not to be based on the mere fact of having a partner, the novel finished in a somewhat classic, patriarchal way.
All was well because of a man.
Which I honestly thought that
1. It was not needed.
2. It went against literally everything that has been said throughout the book.
3. It was just too cheesy and sappy.
4. It was just a joke.

All in all this book was enjoyable.
Unfortunately, towards the end the messages got cheapened by the repetition and the ending itself. The feminism so strongly celebrated throughout the whole novel also fell flat because of the fairytale ending.

I am not going to lie. I struggled with how to rate Pretending.
The messages themselves deserve nothing less than a five (5) stars, but how can I actually give this rating when those messages were almost denied by the ending of the book itself?
In a book such as this one, the messages are what make the novel stand out, you know. But the complete 180 these same messages took in the end were the demise of Pretending.
The patriarchy was challenged (as it should be), but was it really?

I was not particularly comfortable with how men were portrayed. And this is a very strange thing to say but hear me out.
April starts the novel by affirming ”I hate men” and finishes by stating ”I hate some men. Her point of view ever so slightly changed because she met one decent guy, because literally every single other male character present in the story is, to say it quite frankly, a piece of shit. Which, in my opinion, does not sit well in the feminist narrative that should be told. Firstly, because the goal is balance and equality (and not a matriarchy – you are not a feminist because you hate all men), and secondly because the stress in this book was given to the fact that a woman does not need a man to be somebody.

Instead, almost every female character in the book is married or desperately looking for a man. And this goes (yet again) against the overall desired message.
Why was April’s flatmate’s character arc based on her getting her heart broken by a guy even if we were told she was independent, successful and happy since the day she swore men off?
Why was April’s school friend’s story centered around getting married and her now-husband giving an abominable speech which broke her heart in a million pieces?

Both of these ladies completely and unquestionably did not inscribe themselves into the feminist discussion Pretending pretended (ah, see what I did here?) to be about. Instead, these two characters’ actions and April’s own only added to the narrative of a female being silenced and heartbroken because of a man, and of a girl only finding the right path because of a relationship.
And, in my books, that’s not very modern, feminist and progressive.
But maybe I’m just stupid.

It also did not help that The Places I’ve Cried in Public – the latest YA contemporary by Holly Bourne herself – tackled the exact same topics only in a young-adult-appropriate setting. It felt like reading the same story twice, which I thought was a bit of a cheap move :/

In short.
This felt like a halfhearted attempt to fight the patriarchy.
Great messages, sure, but everything else came straight from the fire-y pits of Hell and made this book a huge disappointment.

"It’s the violation that’s the violence, don’t you see? It’s knowing your boundaries mean bugger-all that’s the trauma – that anyone can touch you, that how you feel about it doesn’t count."