I think we all knew this already, but it’s official: I can be manipulated. Rather easily, in fact.

I don’t know if you live a lifestyle that allows you to not have heard of the above book. If you do, I envy you, because it has been everywhere on my everything for two solid weeks. I first became aware of it several months ago, and actually had it preordered for a while, a preorder I cancelled when the word Dramione first entered my vocabulary.

So why do I own it now, snagging it from my local Barnes and Noble for a surprisingly reasonable $21 and change?

Because the reviews this damn book has been getting have been ludicrously good, and while I don’t really think it’s going to be all that good, and I’ve been burned by BookTok fads approximately fourteen thousand times before, if this book is half as good as people have been claiming it’s going to be something I need to read. And the reviews don’t seem quite as dominated by young women as one might expect; TikTok is the world’s epicenter for the “book girly,” a category that I think is supposed to exclude grizzled and ancient penis-havers such as myself, but I’ve seen guys talking about it too, if perhaps not quite as glowingly.

It’s a thousand fucking pages long. I have far too many thousand-page books on my TBR, and seriously, y’all are never going to stop laughing when you see the state of my shelf tomorrow. I will get to it when I get to it, God damn it, and if I don’t love it I’m never trusting another TikTok book of the moment again.(*)

That was a lie, sadly. I knew it was a lie when I was typing it, and it’s a lie now.

The fucking book doesn’t even have pretty edges. I’m trying to save for a down payment on a car, damn it, what the hell am I doing?

(*) What am I reading right now? Book five of Dungeon Crawler Fucking Carl. Which is so much better than it has any right to be that there should be some kind of law that it’s breaking.