Ivy Winslow has the house to herself for a week while her parents are away. She’s planning to use this newfound freedom to binge-watch her favorite fantasy TV show, H-MAD, and hang out with her best friend, Henry. She’ll also have to avoid her former best friend-turned enemy (and neighbor), Mack. But things quickly go awry when Ivy wakes up to find Weston, the gorgeous, very fictional main character of H-MAD in her bedroom, claiming to be her soul mate.
Ivy realizes that her fanfic writing has somehow brought Weston as she’s imagined him to life. But it turns out that the tropes she swoons over in her stories are slightly less romantic in reality, and her not-so-fictional crush is causing some real-world problems. To figure out why Weston is here and what to do with him, Ivy decides to team up with Henry and (against her better judgment) Mack. But with Mack back in her life, Ivy starts to wonder if Weston, her “perfect guy”, is the one who’s truly perfect for her . . . or if that was someone else all along.
Did Not Finish at 20%
I’ll be completely truthful with you guys: this book was a mistake for me to pick up.
You know when you think you have an idea of how a book is going to go, so you pick it up, only to realize that it is actually going a different way that should have been obvious from the description? That was The Perfect Guy Doesn’t Exist for me.
I found the idea of a girl who writes fanfiction and ends up having her favorite character come to life to be an interesting concept. I’m sure a lot of people out there wish they could interact with the characters from their favorite piece of media, and as someone constantly thinking about the world of their favorite book, I thought this would be a fun book to pick up!
And there was a lot I was intrigued by in this book.
For one, while I didn’t get far enough to understand the relationship between Ivy and her ex-best friend, Mack, I was interested in seeing how their relationship changed from being so close (to the point that Ivy used to have a crush on Mack) to being enemies.
I was also really enjoying the way this book kept jumping between the past and present to show their relationship. As I made my way through the book, the details of what happened between Ivy and Mack in their past were slowly revealed to me, interspersed with scenes of Ivy struggling to figure out what to do with her very fictional favorite character, Weston.
But beyond that, I couldn’t find much else to enjoy in this book.
For one, I did not like Weston. At all. To be fair on the book, the whole point is that the idea of Weston should be appealing to Ivy, but the actual man himself shouldn’t. We’re not really supposed to like Weston. But when we’re confronted by a man who is extremely clingy, aggressive, and possessive of Ivy and are stuck with a main character who is enamored by his presence alone, it becomes a little difficult to read about.
For two, the writing in this book, especially when about Weston and the things he says… pained me. That might be a plus to Sophie Gonzales’ writing, considering how the version of Weston in this book is based off of Ivy’s immature writing style, but the purple prose? At 20% of the way through the book, he says (and I quote) “As long as I’m with you, I could sleep on a bed of molten coals beneath a blanket of thorns, and I’d cry out not in pain, but in ecstasy.”
I can’t. I had to put the book down and never pick it up again from that line alone.
Also? This is me being very open and honest with you guys in a way that’s embarrassing, but I… thought Mack was a guy. Before I started actually reading this book, based off of the cover alone, I thought Mack was the blond boy on the cover.
That’s Ivy. On the cover. Our main character. Mack is a girl, and this is a SAPPHIC ROMANCE NOVEL.
But that just goes to show how incredibly wrong my assumptions of this book were before I picked it up.
This one’s my fault. I’m sorry.
KiiitasticBooks 