I love books with terrible side characters... (Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell)

 

Today I’m talking about Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell by Tobias Madden. This is one of those books that I have no idea where I heard about it or found it. It just popped up into my realm one day and I got it.

Our blurb, and there’s a lot of it let me warn you, says that Seventeen-year-old gaymer Noah Mitchell only has one friend left: the wonderful, funny, strictly online-only MagePants69. After years playing RPGs together, they know everything about each other, except anything that would give away their real-life identities. And Noah is certain that if they could just meet in person, they would be soulmates. Noah would do anything to make this happen – including finally leaving his gaming chair to join a community theatre show that he’s only somewhat sure MagePants69 is performing in. Noah has never done anything like theatre – he can’t sing, dance, and he’s never willingly watched a musical – but he’ll have to go all in to have a chance at love. With Noah’s mum in the leading role, and former friends waiting in the wings to sabotage his reputation, his plan to make MagePants69 fall in love with him might be a little more difficult than originally anticipated. And the longer Noah waits to come clean, the more tangled his web of lies becomes. By opening night, he will have to decide if telling the truth is worth closing the curtain on his one shot at true love.

The literal very first line of this book is Noah saying he’s in love. It’s a solid first line. It lets you know something’s happening, and then Noah lets you know it’s with MagePants69 – which is an absolutely rancid name. Now something I’ll say, this first chapter, where Noah is just playing the RPG, Noah comes off as a massive loser, like that’s just how he is. He complains about people who criticised the RPG he loves, complains about his mum calling his name. He gave me very Discord mod vibes, but not like one of those musty ones, one of those that you’re just like, “Oh, poor you”, ones, because he also mentions that something happened in the past and it’s the reason that he has no friends. Still, his mum asks him to join the theatre production of Chicago she’s in, and she says it’s basically because she wants him to leave his room for once.

Now, I do want to complain about his mother. So, apparently Noah had this rule that he wasn’t allowed to share any personal information to anyone online, which fair enough, but then his mum said that his online friends weren’t “real people”, but like… if she’s not letting him share any information about himself, how could they become “real people”? Like, ma’am, make it make sense. As a character, Noah’s mum just didn’t seem nice – like she wasn’t a nice person. There’s also this point where she comes out and says that she asked Noah to join the production so that maybe the two could spend time together, but she spends most of her time criticising him in some way.

In chapter two he’s in school and you find out he has this nickname, Noah Snitchell, so I figured that had something to do with the not having friends. Someone sends him a porn link to his school email, but whoever sent it used his teacher’s name, so he opens it and gets clowned. Then in chapter three, MagePants69 says they’re going to be online late and then they conveniently get online about 15 minutes after Noah’s mum comes home from rehearsal, and they (MagePants69) casually drop they were also at rehearsal. So even though it’s literally just the times lining up, Noah magically assumes MagePants69 has to be in the cast. Granted, they do know some details about each other, like how they live in the same city, are the same age and are both gay. So it’s plausible. Anyway, because of that, Noah decides to join the cast. I will say though, you do get confirmation that MagePants69 is this kid, Eli, who is in fact in the cast.

You know those TikToks of people making fun of anime kids? Noah’s voice sometimes came off as one of those anime kids, especially in the early chapters. I did appreciate that though, because, to me, that meant that he had a recognisable voice. But while I think that anime kid voice sort of dropped as you the book went on, he sort of picked up this other voice as he got more used to talking to people again. I also thought it was fun in the beginning once Noah got confirmation that Eli was MagePants69. But saying that, the fact that Noah spends the majority of the book technically lying to Eli was pretty crusty on Noah’s part.

As I was reading this, I was a little confused about who the target audience was. On one hand, the characters would be talking about erections, sex, douching, things like that, and then Noah would get bullied at school and the bullying (more often than not) that happened just kind of felt unrealistic. Like, I’d read a bit of it and fully think to myself, “That’s not how that would work in real life, but okay”. It would be something that happened, and the teachers all seemed to immediately think that Noah was this awful child that couldn’t be trusted.

There’s also this one big secret that looms over Noah and the book as a whole. So, there’s a girl, Prisha, that mentions to Eli and the other theatre kids (one Noah has joined the cast) that Noah can’t be trusted and isn’t who he seems. This did get me interested as I wanted to know why she was thinking this way. And Noah does repeatedly mention that something happened, and that there was an ex-best friend called Tan involved. And like I say, I was interested, as this secret kept getting brought up, but by the time I got to page 130 (this is the page I specifically had this thought at), I found myself wanting some kind of detail about what happened. While I definitely was interested in finding out what happened, I don’t think details were fed to the readers very well. You do find out what happens, and I was definitely a little bit gagged when I found out what happened, but it all comes out in one big explosion after being held over you for the whole book without being given any details.

Since I mentioned Prisha briefly, her entire personality throughout the entire book is theatre, flipping her ponytail and coming for Noah, and that only changes towards the very end where you get one scene that explains why she acted the way she did. But since she’d been so horrible to Noah the whole book, I didn’t care. And this was a problem I noticed with almost every side character, save maybe for Noah’s mum, they were all very one dimensional. Take Noah’s bullies, Simon and Hawk for example, throughout the entire book, they never do anything besides be bullies. I wish the side characters had something else to them, like a little humanity – something to make me want to care about them and something that would make me see them as something other than someone who is unkind to Noah. So, between Prisha, Simon and Hawk, and Noah’s mum, so many of the side characters were just unlikable.

As You Walk On By, by Julian Winters, had a side character in it called Aleah. She was in a similar position to Prisha in this book. However, with Aleah, you got to see some cracks of weakness and humanity between all the disdain she felt towards the main character of the book she was in. And that was what I felt was missing from the side characters in this book, again, maybe with the exception of Noah’s mum. I understood her circumstances once they were explained to the reader towards the end of the book. But since she had been so horrible, and I mean genuinely horrible, to Noah throughout the majority of the book, by the time we find out why she acts the way she does, it wasn’t nearly enough to undo the fact that she was just so unlikeable. It was very much, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but that doesn’t excuse the rancid behaviour you’ve displayed” vibes.

Anyway, so I’m not just complaining, I’ll talk about a few more things I did like about this book. The big secret. Like I mentioned before, I did want to find out what it was, and the book did a good job in keeping me wanting to. I was interested in finding out what happened to make Noah have no friends. Noah’s mum mentions that she doesn’t want Noah getting involved with Eli because she mentions he already has one failed showmance, and I was also very interested in finding out about that.

Even though Noah (technically) spent the entire book lying to Eli, I do have to admit, I liked him as a character. Outside of the main plot, you get to see his struggles with boy image as a gay teenager. He’s a very skinny kid, and there’s this line in the book that, to paraphrase, says, “Thirteen-year-old girls would kill for your body”. It was nice seeing that representation of someone who is skinnier struggling with their body image. I say that, because I feel like you do occasionally see, in the real world, those people who are like, “Well, you’re skinny, what issue could you possibly have with your body?” when it’s not just bigger people that suffer with the way they look. I appreciated seeing that struggle in Noah.

And that’s where I’m going to leave this. I’m very torn with how I feel about this book. Like I said, I liked Noah as a character, and I thought the plot was interesting with him balancing knowing Eli in real life, while also knowing that he is also his online best friend while pretending he doesn’t know. But conversely, my biggest gripe was the side characters and how the majority of them were just (to me) unlikeable.

Okay, bye!