Disappoint Me

This book was gorgeous and emotional. The main character, Max, is sharp, funny, snarky, sarcastic, and insecure, yet never irritating. She felt immediately familiar, like the kind of friend I’d love to have in my life. I also fell hard and fast for Vincent. The relationship navigation in this book, the anxieties around the future, the desires, and the insecurities, felt painfully relatable. Without giving anything away, the rollercoaster of feelings made me fully invested not just in Max and Vincent, but also in Alex and Simone. The conversations around wanting children, especially, not just whether you want them, but whether you would want them if life’s barriers didn’t make it a painful, complicated decision. This is the kind of show more book I wish I could read again for the first time. I’m begging you to pick it up, not just because of the moving story but because I believe this book could shift perspectives and fuel empathy.

Thanks to NetGalley and The Dial Press for access to this book. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his show more corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it possible to love someone after you know their worst moments? Is it possible to love someone when you don't know their worst moments?

That's an existential question, applying to each and all of us. It's one to ask yourself when thinking about any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Max is doing a lot of thinking about relationships to self, and to Truth, and to facts...and Vincent. She's been blindsided in her complex developing relationship to him. Add to this a quite conservative Chinese family (pretty much a trope heading into stereotype-dom at this point) that's honestly struggling (I mean struggling, and being honest about it) with her transfem identity, and to the past actions Vincent undertook that form a separate narrative strand.

When Max decides she is going to pursue a heteronormative identity, it came after a crisis in her life. This makes it feel a bit forced. If this had been something Max was mulling over, I'd've found its narrative suddenness a bit less jarring. That said, I'm actually kind of relieved not to have the narrative focus on Max's transition...it's happened, it's done, what's next? Vincent being okay with her transness was, dare I say it, a bit less startling than I was perhaps expected to find it. Until, that is, we move into a timeline of Vincent's past and discover what Max now learns; this event is going to change everything in the present as it did in the past.

What matters in all these deftly plucked strands of Author Dinan's story-web is the essential unknowability of one's emotional life once given into the hands of another. What we feel for the other, what is felt by the other, how all that will intertwine to make the web that couplehood sticks us to, what new information—truth, fact, realty—means in that web is where we're meant to focus. At times the quotidian world intrudes and distracts, or is allowed to intrude and distract. The attentive reader will notice register shifts in Author Dinan's prose from pleasantly descriptive to nearly florid at those moments. I'm assuming food is a comfort drug to Max and her found family....

Where do we end up in this web? In it. I read the book assuming I'd reach a conclusion to some of those issues raised above. I do not think quite a few people will find the openness of the ending, the real lack of closure for Max and, to a lesser degree of investment, Vincent, to be satisfying. I took a star off because I was not given a sense that, by the end, Max had any kind or sort of response, still less plan, to all she's learned. We simply...leave the story, trailing web-strands of it behind us.

Not a perfect read, then, but one I very much enjoyed. More from you soon, please, Author Dinan! show less

Perfect for Pride Month! This is the story of Max, a trans woman searching for companionship while navigating the emotional complexities of her life. It’s a compelling journey of self-evolution, learning to understand, forgive, and truly love yourself, even through shame and guilt.
The novel is thought-provoking, exploring different facets of trans experiences, anti-androgens, identity, truth, lies and the gray areas in between, all through the lens of Max and a cis man who's on his own path of self-discovery.
The way the past and present intertwine creates a space where real growth happens, for both of them. A moving, insightful read that speaks to the human experience, no matter who you are.
*I was invited to read by the publisher show more through NetGalley for an honest review show less

This book was a languid but emotional journey through dual timelines and points of view that surround Max and Vincent and how, in the end, those experiences make them who they are, and whether those people can have a life together.
Max is a trans woman and I adored her as a character. Anyone who can be honest with their characters and show that 'not everyone is a monolith' is what I really look for. Max struggles with her culture, dating, and trauma.
I mention that the storyline was almost languid and that's because this is written how life is; you just roll with the punches and continue on. It's easy daily struggles and the really hard ones. I appreciate the unflinching look at the trans experience, culture and sexuality.

"This is also the world where people, often women, are doomed to spend much of their lives forgiving the errors of others and suffering for the sake of other people's growth."

With minimal plot and heavily character driven, I found the first 30% of the book to be a little slow and hard to get into. Once the pace started to pick up, I was so deep into this story. I can't explain how much I enjoyed the writing style, especially the blunt, dry humor. All the characters felt so real, and complex, as if I was just a bystander watching someone else's life happening before me. Which made finishing the book bittersweet, as I didn't want to say bye to Max and Vincent just yet.
There are so many quotes in this book that are so relatable, I'm show more really tempted to get a physical copy just to annotate all of them. After reading Disappoint Me, Nicola Dinan's debut novel, Bellies, is going on my tbr right away.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House/The Dial Press for the ARC of this ebook! show less

This book is a story of Max, a trans woman turning thirty, and her relationship with Vincent, a kind and stable man, maybe too good to be true. Told in alternating timelines - Max's present-day narrative and Vincent's decade-old travels in Thailand.

The story is both raw and tender, prose so beautiful. The descriptions of food were simply mouth-watereing. This book really captures the essence of millenial relationships in this time and age that we live in.

Thank you NetGalley and The Dial Press for a copy of this book.

I was surprised by this one. I went in blind, and assumed I was in for some sad-girl lit fic from the cover. We follow a trans woman in her new relationship with a man, her family, and her friend group. The writing made me feel like a fly on the wall, it really pulls you in. I loved the portrayal of the complexities and decisions to be made in all her different relationships. I will have to check out Bellies.