Psych Major Syndrome by Alicia Thompson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
College freshman and psychology major, Leigh Nolan, finds her problem-solving skills woefully inadequate when it comes to her increasingly tangled and complicated romantic relationships.
I don’t always rate abandoned books, and certainly don’t review them, because often I feel like I don’t have a right, having not read hardly any of it. However, with this book, I disliked it by page 28 and couldn’t find a single reason to keep reading, so I’m including a 1 star (did not like it) rating and a brief review.
I found the main character’s personality grating. She complained a lot, but actively chose to ignore her problems or any ways of fixing them, instead choosing to….you guessed it, complain some more! With all the complaints about herself and her life she had, she still somehow managed to talk about herself as if she thought she was super special, even to the extent of denigrating others to show how special she was. I’m aware that some character progression would probably be made later in the book, but when I tried to imagine forcing my way through this book long enough to get to that, I wanted to jump off a balcony…
The boyfriend was an asshole, which is more of a personal annoyance, not a flaw in the novel. It’s perfectly normal to have a character the audience isn’t supposed to like, but when it’s a book where I personally can’t even like the main character, it’s hard to deal with the annoying characters, too.
Actually all the side characters felt fairly…..not even just unrealistic, but affected and fake-interesting.
Basically the whole thing felt like the author was trying too hard to create uniqueness.
In an attempt to discover if the book would improve, I took to Goodreads reviews (which I didn’t bother with before reading because someone recommended this one to me personally, a choice which I regret) and discovered people to be pretty divided. A love it or hate it sort of thing.
But what settled the matter of keep slogging through or give up, was a review by Maggie whose resolve I applaud (they actually managed to finish the book). Their review covered a part of the book that got pretty racist. Not having made it this far into the book myself, I recommend you read their review for yourself here.
After reading about it, I realized I wasn’t willing to force my way through a book I didn’t like just to have to read a scene like that!
I will point out that someone in the comments of Maggie’s review says Alicia Thompson has admitted this scene was wrong and claimed to learn from it, but since I couldn’t find any proof of this anywhere, I’d take that with a grain of salt. If true, I’m glad, if not, I’m not surprised, and either way it doesn’t excuse anything or make me willing to finish this book.
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