Review: All The Better Part of Me [ARC]

TITLE: All The Better Part of Me

AUTHOR: Molly Ringle

RELEASE DATE: September 1 2019

RATING: ★★

-----------------------------------------------

Rep: bi MC, gay LI, latinx LI, lesbian side characters

TWs: homophobia

Genre: new adult LGBT romance
-----------------------------------------------


E-ARC kindly provided by the publisher.

----------------------------------------------

“I’ll kiss you, just this once. If you want.”

He snorted. “Right. Sure.”

“I will. People do that. They kiss their friends. It happens.”

Sinter Blackwell is 25, an aspiring actor, on the verge of making it big. His whole life he’s been interested in women and women only…except for that one time he kissed his best friend, Andy, back when both of them were in high school. And for some peculiar reason, that kiss has stayed on his mind for years. Anyway, life happened, they both went away to college; Andy eventually settled in Seattle and Sinter in London. But all these years later, Sinter can’t let the thought of Andy go. What if he has feelings for him? What if he’s always had feelings for him? What if he likes boys too?

----

Let me just start off by saying that I didn’t really like this book. It’s taken me forever to pinpoint exactly why it wasn’t to *my* tastes, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

I think what irritated me the most about this book was how my expectations didn’t match up with what this book turned out to be, at all. Honestly, reading the blurb on Netgalley made me think this would be a slow-burn cutesy and fluffy NA gay romance, but what we got wasn’t really that at all.
The first time I realized this book was going to give me something other than what I’d hoped for was when the characters kissed around the 40% mark. When characters kiss this early – and especially if they’re endgame – it leaves a lot of time for other things to happen. I’m just going to straight up say that I am not the biggest fan of drama, and the sheer amount of drama in this story totally overwhelmed me, and not in a good way. There was just too much and eventually it made me lose interest in this story.

I am giving this book a solid two stars because in between all the drama which in generally annoyed me, I actually liked Sinter. I liked him and his voice, and I really appreciated how this book had a male character to raise a kid on his own! (and also allowed a woman to give up her baby, which is another thing I appreciated). I wish this story in general would have focused more on Sinter’s and Andy’s relationship, after having finished this book I still don’t feel like I know who Andy truly is. In general, their relationship didn’t catch me in the way I hoped it would; that’s partly why I would have liked this book to focus more on *them* as a couple.

As for Sinter’s bisexuality, I feel like bisexuality is hard to write and hard even to get, really, if you’re not bi yourself. As a bisexual person myself, I’m mostly content with how this author wrote bisexuality. She didn’t fall into any common traps concerning perceptions of bisexuality, apart from the fact that Sinter had to sleep with a man to prove his bisexuality (to himself, but still). You’re just!! as bi!! if you’ve only slept!! with people of one gender. The one aspect concerning sexuality I rather disliked was how a lot of the drama in this book surrounded Andy trying to pressure Sinter to come out. Aside from that being straight up gross, I personally think it’s highly improbable that an LGBT person would try to force another member of the community to come out ESPECIALLY when they’re aware coming out might be dangerous or otherwise harmful to that person.

Overall, I wasn’t too impressed with this book. It had it’s moments and it’s not straight up awful but it sadly just didn’t work out for me. I’m sure there will be other readers out there who’ll absolutely adore this book, though!