The Last Romeo by Justin Myers was definitely a book that I read...

 So, I read Justin Myers’ 2018 novel, The Last Romeo, recently…

            I can’t really think of any witter opener for this, so I just going to be up front and say that this isn’t going to be the most positive review of the book. As of me writing this review, the book has a 4.3-star rating on Amazon from 227 global ratings, so this book clearly has an audience, I just don’t think that I was that audience. So, for my review, I’ll start with what I liked about the book.

            It was well-written, for one. I’m not the most keen-eyed reader, as in, I won’t always notice when there’s a single comma out of place or if there is something missing from a sentence. But there have been books that I’ve noticed errors like that in, and if it’s something I’ve noticed, then it’s a glaring error. This book had none of those. Like, there weren’t any sentences that I had to stop and re-read for me to try and understand what was being said. I also appreciated that this book didn’t try and force in unnecessarily large words where they don’t belong like so many novels do. This book knew its lane and stayed in it. A few of the Amazon reviews did mention that this was a holiday/beach read, and honestly? I see that.

            I didn’t particularly notice any plot holes. Then again, the plot of this book wasn’t particularly that deep. Now, I realise that reads as a negative, but in this context, it’s not. Like I just mentioned, this book knew its lane and stayed in it. So many other books don’t. They try and be unnecessarily complicated and slog themselves down with unnecessary details, characters, twists and double-crosses. And not every book needs to do that. Sometimes a book is fine with a nice, light plot, like this one. Thanks to that, I never really found myself feeling like I had to try and keep up with everything going on - the whole thing was very digestible.

            The plot itself sees Jim break up with his long-term partner, of six years, Adam, in the beginning. Jim then proceeds to start his blog where he writes about the dates that he goes on to try and find his “Romeo”, his one. Cool, nothing wrong so far. When I read that description of the book, I was into it. Throughout the book we see entries that Jim posts to his blog, titled things like “The Filthy Romeo” and “The Edamame Romeo”, which I thought was a really cute idea seeing these glamourised versions of dates that Jim went on.

We also see Jim’s blog gain traction and followers, and we see the occasional message that Jim receives. I do think that a little more could have been done when it came to all the social media stuff, because, even though Jim’s popularity online as “Romeo” ends up coming to a head and starts turning sour, but we don’t really see all that much about what Jim actually does about it. Like he gets trolls and hate, and the book sort of just ignores it. I would have liked it if there was even just some tiny mention of Jim blocking, or muting, the trolls he was getting, but instead there wasn’t really anything.

Now, the main problem I had with the book was that I just didn’t like Jim as a character. He came off like a bit of, for lack of better phrasing, a twat. The first major instance I felt like was on page fourteen where Jim comes into work and we’re introduced to Jim’s “nemesis” at work, Hurley – a younger gay man. We’re then given the following passage which explains why Jim and Hurley don’t like each other:

“The battle lines were drawn

 when he discovered my habit of sneaking into his articles and changing words around. I couldn’t let an errant semi-colon or a poorly constructed sentence go unchecked. The trouble was, once I was in there, I couldn’t help myself, and when Hurley discovered I’d practically rewritten an entire piece about one of his favourite reality stars, the shit hit the fan” (14).

Now, Hurley was clearly set up as an antagonist. But, honestly, I’d be siding with Hurley on this if I worked with the two of them. Sure, Jim says that he “couldn’t help” himself, but why didn’t he literally just talk to Hurley about his writing, and just suggest changes that he would have made if it was that important? A little further down the same page, Jim says that his as Hurley’s relationship was, “dead on arrival” (14), but it wasn’t – it died because Jim decided to edit Hurley’s work without telling him and then proceeding to argue with Hurley about it, like Hurley was the one in the wrong.

So, yeah, that was the first part that got me thinking: Hmm, I don’t know whether I like Jim.

The thing is that the protagonist of a story doesn’t necessarily have to be “good”. They could literally be the villain, but they need to have redeeming quality or some level of relatability to them. And, sure, for me, I could relate to Jim on being gay, but that was it. The fact that he is nearly ten years older than I am may have something to do with the fact that I couldn’t really relate to him, but I’ve read YA books where the protagonists have been almost ten years younger than me, and I’ve found them to be more relatable than Jim was.

One good example I have of this is Jack from Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) by L.C. Rosen that sees Jack (the protagonist of Jack of Hearts) in a remarkably similar situation that Jim ends up in in The Last Romeo – the starting of a salacious blog that gains traction and that traction leads to some form of negative impact on the protagonist’s life.

The difference between Jack and Jim is that Jack is a changed person by the end of the book from what he’s learned. Jim just ends up getting offered a job at the end of his book. And since things just seemed to work out for him without him needing to do any self-reflection, why would he need to grow or learn?

Now, in terms of me not really liking Jim, because he really came off as self-centred, this really took away from all the other characters. Maybe that was the point. Because the whole thing was about Jim, it didn’t really matter what was going on with the others. Sure, there was the whole sub-plot of Bella (Jim’s best friend) moving to Russia that got mentioned occasionally. But other than that, there wasn’t all that much going on with any of the other characters – that seemed important to Jim – until the last fifty pages of the book where one of the other characters vomits up all of their problems that Jim hadn’t noticed because he was too busy being “Romeo”.

Now, I wouldn’t have minded this so much if Jim hadn’t had horse blinders on the whole book. If there had been little mentions of the other characters and how they maybe seemed in a worse mood than usual or how they seemed different, that would have been better.

The entire book also gave me this “boo, young people” vibe. To go back to Hurley again, I’ll pick another quote from early on in the book, where Jim and his boss, Roland, are talking about how Hurley has a sizable social media following, so is good for the company. The books goes on to say, “I’d had the displeasure of sitting through Hurley’s dreary vlogs, in which he forensically analysed everything from Beyoncé’s old eyeliner to old pairs of trainers he’d once loved” (17). This really made me think that Jim was one of those people who thinks that things that he isn’t the target audience for are automatically bad. Jim isn’t the target audience of Hurley’s vlogs, and so, to Jim, that immediately makes them pointless.

To give a personal example, I recently watched Julie and the Phantoms on Netflix. I definitely wasn’t the target audience for it, but I still enjoyed it. Even with the jokes which I didn’t find funny, because they were aimed at an audience younger than myself, I was able to take a moment to think, Okay, this joke wasn’t for me, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means it’s not for me.

Jim just doesn’t have this ideology. And, sure, not every person and character has to have the same way of thinking as me (books would be really boring if they did), but Jim retains this ideology throughout the entirety of the book, and there isn’t a single stutter from him, even when Roland does directly challenge him. I really just wanted to tell Jim to grow up and at least see that just because something wasn’t for him, that didn’t make it bad.

It was kind of like Jim just had zero self-awareness of anything that didn't directly affect him.

The whole book just made me feel like there was some aversion to, or agenda against, younger gays, like maybe Myers had seen all of those skinny white twinks and hunky gays on Instagram (you know the ones, the ones that show off their boyfriends who happen to look remarkably similar to them, those ones) with large followings and toxic mindsets and then decided that all young gay men were like that. To his credit, there definitely is that group of toxic twinks and hunks out there. But they don’t account for the whole gay community of this generation. There’s toxicity in every generation (and every fandom). For every racist and homophobic seventy-year-old woman, there is another one that is the exact opposite, one who is the biggest supporter of people of colour and the LGBTQ+ community.

              

The thing is, there likely wasn't an agenda against the younger generation of gays and social media gays. But whether intentional or not, this book, to me, came off like there was one.

That’s really all that I had to say. I’d like to round out this review saying, while I didn’t enjoy the book, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was objectively bad. It was well-written and without any major, glaring, plot-holes. I just didn’t like the protagonist as a person and when I finished the book, I left it with a bit of a funny feeling.

It’s safe to say that I won’t be reaching to re-read it any time soon. I have a pile of books to be donated, and, honestly, that’s where this one is going. It just wasn’t for me.