Review: F*ck Love by Tarryn Fisher

Greetings, readers! Happy Saturday and welcome to Fiction Fairies. Today I'll be reviewing F*ck Love by Tarryn Fisher.



Helena Conway has fallen in love.
Unwillingly. Unwittingly.
But not unprovoked.
Kit Isley is everything she's not - unstructured, untethered,
and not even a little bit careful.
It could all be so beautiful... if he wasn't dating her best friend.
Helena must defy her heart, do the right thing, and think of others.
Until she doesn't.
Summary from Goodreads.com



I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS.

Yay for Ron Swanson.

There. That was dramatic.
I mean, I knew Tarryn Fisher has a fantastic writing style, but I still wasn't expecting this.
I read her book Marrow several months ago and was captivated. Horrified. Amazed. Fisher's writing grips you by the throat and refuses to let you breath until you read the very last word of her book. The same thing happened to me with F*ck Love.

The first half of the book, I was just going along with Helena and Kit. I wasn't super happy with them. I hate angst, and this story has it in spades. Then, about 70% through, the truth of the book hit me.
Like a truck.
Fisher spoke to me in this book - a lot of the message she sends directly applied to me. She talks about holding yourself back, conforming to expectations, lying to yourself, wanting what's safe, being afraid to let go of yourself and show people who you really are. She even mentions at one point how reading romance novels is just an escape mechanism, a way to avoid reality and responsibility.

That's the nature of the truth, though. What's fun about being dropped into ice water? That's why half the world walks around wearing rose-colored glasses, watching comedies and reading romance books.

When I read the quote, I didn't want to admit how accurate it was.

Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges.

I was, once again, horrified after reading this book. But unlike with Marrow, I wasn't horrified by the darkness of human nature/how unfair the world is. With this book,  I was horrified with how much I hold myself back, how much I avoid reality, and how much life I'm missing. When I finished F*ck Love, I wanted to run outside and buy the next plane ticket to Iceland and start my world-wide exploration. I had this huge desire to just live the life I've always dreamed of and be happy and sad and heartbroken and exhilarated.
It's an inspiring book.
It pokes at all your rules and asks, "Why can't you be you? Why can't you do that? Don't regret never taking the leap."


ANYWHO.

The characters honestly bugged the heck out of me. I liked them 50% of the time and wanted to slap them the other 50%.

• Although Helena was cute and funny and a total Harry Potter dork, she was also weak, and melodramatic. While her stalker tendencies made me laugh a lot, she also frustrated me to no end.
• Kit... I... I didn't get it. What was so great about him? So many people freaking loved him. He was just a mysterious, hipster artist who loved passionately and spoke only when he had something meaningful to say. Not my type, but maybe it's yours?
• Greer was like a fairy with lavender hair who was free-spirited and sweet and sassy and brought out the "real" Helena.
• Helena's best friend was annoying and a horrible human being.

The romance was, like I said before, not my cup of tea. I loathe angst and broody, moody relationships full of passion and scorned lovers. But as I understand it, a number of people enjoy that.
The plot kept me captivated! I read the whole book in one day. No joke.
To conclude: 
I was quite frustrated with the characters, while at the same time morbidly fascinated. I was hooked, and couldn't put down the book. Fisher's writing style is magnificent... Spell-binding. The words flow beautifully. The main ideas behind F*ck Love really hit home with me, and seriously made me reconsider myself and my life ambitions. I'm going to have to re-read this one.


I'll wrap it up with one of the more moving quotes, which also represents a critical message in the book:

Don't be upset that you can't attain constant happiness. It's the quickest way to feel like a failure in life. If each of our lives represented a page in a book, happiness would be the punctuation. It breaks up the parts that are too long. It closes off some things, divides others. But it's brief - showing up when it's needed and filling tired paragraphs with breaks.

If you have any comments to share, I would love to hear them!

Kisses~~
Cassie