Review: My Summer of Love and Misfortune by Lindsay Wong

 

Before I started reading this, I decided to check the rating on Goodreads. Something that I don't do too often because I will then end up reading my friends reviews and that will stay in my mind while I am reading the book. I only looked at the star rating and I was shocked that this had a 2 star average rating. Seeing this, I stayed away from the reviews. I had heard from some booktubers that I watched that they had DNF'ed it and that was it.

So we are following a teenager named Iris. She is Chinese American and she is a very materialistic, narcissistic moron. She has two parents who are not very smart. Her mom is the CEO of an engineering company and her dad is obsessed with Chinese zodiac and getting manicures and pedicures. All her life, she has known that she is cursed because she was born in the year of the Tiger. Tiger girls are cursed and doomed while Tiger boys bring good fortune for the family. 

Reading the first two chapters, I had to vlog myself reading this. I was blown out of my mind that this girl could be so ignorant and obnoxious. She didn't get into any of the colleges she applied to, she failed her senior year by not showing up and she thinks the email from her guidance counselor is a request to be Valedictorian. She gets cheated on by her boyfriend with her best friend. She is sent away to China to fix herself and she then thinks that her parents are fake and then proceeds to look into Forbes top 30 in Asia to find her real parents. She has panic attacks about learning and she can't speak Mandarin to save her life. 

I really hated Iris, but I believe that she was supposed to be an unlikeable main character. I don't want to fault the book for that, but when the parents also make idiotic statements like the mother asking Iris, has no one ever taught you to stay away from strangers. The dad not really knowing anything about his brother and thinking that the uncle and cousin are dirt poor. 

I also could not feel an inch of sympathy for Iris when she got screwed over by her love interest. I know what it feels like to be lied to your face, but girl, for someone who loves attention she needed to pay more attention to the body language of her "lover".