Y'all, I was so excited for this book when I first heard about it. I campaigned to get an ARC for months, and when I finally got approved on Edelweiss, I was elated. I saved it for right before I was going to be traveling, thinking it would be a humorous read for the many airports I'd be sitting in. But it didn't turn out that way, unfortunately.
I definitely didn't think I'd be DNFing a book I'd been looking forward to for months, I can tell you that much.
Brooding YA Hero is about Broody, a perpetual main character who is suddenly no longer wanted in the cast of books written by the authors who (he thought) love him. The book is essentially his guide to becoming a main character in your own right. He talks about the many ways to get a plot arc and about how to get the love interest by the end. Sounds great and super funny, right?
Well, it is funny - that I can tell you. But the pockets of funny didn't make up for my intense boredom throughout most of the book.
Why I DNFed
I made it all the way to the 69% mark before I finally DNFed this one. Yes, you read that correctly. But I just couldn't justify wasting any more of my time on it when it put me right to sleep every single time I picked it up.
It read like a textbook. A funny textbook, sure, but the plot was less plot and more how-to, which turned into a yawn really fast.
I was missing out on the illustrations, which may have helped. This is because it was a digital ARC, but I'm pretty sure I could have stayed more into it if I had had the entire picture. (See what I did there?)
Broody read as super unlikable. I expected this, but by the time I had DNFed, he hadn't grown at all. It was disappointing.
The moral of this story is that I think Broody is better left on Twitter than in a book of his own.
Would I pick this up again?
Yeah, I expect I'll finish it one day. Like I said, it was super funny, and I really like Carrie Ann DiRisio, the author. So it's nothing personal against her. I just think it was a tough one to categorize, and didn't read as novel enough for its intended purpose.
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for providing me with an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion in any way.
Happy reading!
-A.