43%
26.05.26This was... exuberant, with strong sense of place (Manchester) and time (the 1980s), although the pop culture references were rather shoehorned in. And that was the problem - a better edit would have sorted the awkwardness, poor pacing and repetition. In particular, characters rolled their eyes on almost every page, which must be as tiring for them as it is for the reader.
This was quite sweet and earnest and it didn't actively annoy me. It was rather unrealistic, of course, and both main characters acted (or not) on assumptions with no evidence to back them up, with the 'baddie' not actually being convincingly bad, at least until he was ramped up at the end. As I read it on my Kindle, so didn't really see the cover, I thought it was written by a woman right up until the acknowledgements, but that probably says more about my assumptions than the story/writing style itself.
