First came Disneyland, now get ready for Glitterland... I guess...

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So, this post comes as the first recommendation I got in my YouTube comments, and it was on my Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun video. This recommendation came from Nadia Lampis, and it was for Glitterland by Alexis Hall. And I’ll give the content warning here at the beginning: This book has mention of suicide.

Now, I read the e-book of this, because I wasn’t going to spend £30 on a physical copy (even though the price has since dropped), so I used the Amazon listing description in place of the blurb. So, to paraphrase it: Ash Winters used to be the golden boy of the literary scene, but now he’s kind of washed up. Then, at a stag party, he meets “Essex boy Darian Taylor”, who is an aspiring model who makes Ash laugh. And finally, Ash has been living in his own shadow so long that he can’t see the light for the glitter. So, the gig with this book is that Ash needs to get out of his own way to be able to fall in love – which has come at a weird time, because I recently finished watching a series, Fish Upon the Sky, that had this exact concept.

But something I want to say, even though it sounds like there’s a lot there in the blurb, this was a romance book – one of those porn with not all that much plot books. Like, outside of Ash, there wasn’t really much going on, and that extends to the plot as well.

And something I feel like I should mention, while there definitely is an audience for these porn without plot, or porn with not much plot books, I’m not, personally, that audience. I have no problem whatsoever with these types of books, they’re just not for me. If you like them? Great! And I’m glad you’ve found a style, or genre, of book that you like.

So, in the very first chapter, we see Ash waking up after hooking up with someone, and there were bits of italicised text that served as the thoughts that Ash was having. Now, that’s fine on its own, but these thoughts were ridden with profanity, which was quite jarring, considering no other part of the book was quite that ridden as Ash’s thoughts. But the thing is, we don’t even see Ash’s thoughts all that often either, so this profanity-rife sections and lines do feel a bit ‘punch you in the face I’m here’.

Anyway, Ash calls his friend (and we find out it’s 3am) to come pick him up from this strange place, and when his friend, Niall, does come pick him up, Ash gets into an argument with him, and starts insulting him, as if he didn’t call Niall to come pick him up. And that’s the thing with Ash, he’s an asshole.

Now he does have mental illness – it’s mentioned he is bipolar depressive. But the thing is: mental illness isn’t an excuse to be an asshole to people. There’s a quote, on page 223, that sums up exactly how I feel about Ash as a character. So, basically, and spoilers here, but Ash fucks up with Darian and he needs to go and apologise, so he’s (Ash) talking to one of Darian’s friends, Chloe, and she says this to him: “I don’t fink I hate you. I just don’t fink you’re a very nice person. And that ain’t got nuffin to do wif being bipolar depressed.” Like, Chloe managed to sum up all my feelings towards Ash in those few sentences. Ash wasn’t a nice person throughout the book, and that made it hard for me to want to route for him – even when he started accepting all the bad things he had done. It was very Jojo ‘Too Little Too Late’ for me.

Ash ends up meeting Darian in a gay club, and something I noticed about this book in chapter two, it’s very, and I’m not sure whether this is the correct word I’m looking for but, brazen. Like, I don’t know, it gave me a thick feeling while reading it, and I’m not sure how else to explain it. Also, Darian’s dialogue was written in the Essex accent. And now I’ve written those last couple of point, what I was looking for was “on the nose.” A lot of this book felt very on the nose.

I know I’ve not really spent a lot of time talking about the content and what actually happens in the book, but that’s because, since it is one of those porn with not much plot books, not much does happen. I don’t know quite how to describe it, because there’s around 250 Kindle pages of book, and things do happen, but at the same time, not much happens, if that makes sense? And I think that might just be the case because of the kind of book it is. Like, Ash spends a lot of time wrestling with his mental illness, that happens, but it still feels… I don’t know, like something was missing.

Just so I don’t spend this whole post being negative, I’ll mention the things that I did like about this book now.

My favourite line from this book came on page 77, said by Ash’s friend and agent, Amy. And that is: “[Y]ou know you don’t need a vagina to prepare a salad, right?” And this is also going to sound mean, this is probably the first part of the book I cracked a smile. Like a proper one. There’s also a point where Ash ends up going to “Essex fashion week”, and, I mean, that era of the book was fun, I enjoyed it. Darian and all of Darian’s friends were fun, too. I don’t think there was a single one that I disliked. Ash’s perspective and world was so heavy and sluggish, and I get that was because of his ever-present mental illness, but it was nice to have a bit of light, even if it was only temporary.

Anyway, that’s it for what I liked, and I think this is the end of this post. For my final thoughts, I mentioned above that these porn with not much plot books aren’t my personal preference on what I enjoy reading, and this book was no exception. It definitely had its moments, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed reading it.

Okay, bye!