The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg

The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg

Rating: 3.5 stars

Synopsis: If I'd known right then that this was the kid that would grow up to break my heart beyond repair, maybe I would've stayed upstairs on the phone with Tess. Maybe I would've gone to bed early. Maybe I would've begged my parents to take me with them - even though those doctor dinners are pretty much the most boring things ever. But I didn't know. Couldn't know. So instead I shrugged and said something really genius like 'Um, whatever.' And proceeded to fall totally, madly, crazy in love. 

Review: I'm not entirely sure what I thought about this one. I mean I did really enjoy it - I breezed through it actually - but something was a little...lacking. And I think it was the character of Brie. I just didn't connect with her.

It started out as a really promising book. Brie has literally died of a broken heart - her heart has actually broken in two. Stuck in the afterlife with Patrick, the guy who looks like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Brie has to work through the stages of death - from denial all the way through to acceptance. From there, things get a little bit...strange? I thought Brie would be someone who maybe wouldn't take death in her stride per say, but wouldn't be overcome with revenge so fast and so much. This need for revenge takes up most of the book and you can tell that she's got everything wrong. Brie makes all these assumptions and it's pretty obvious that she's wrong about them.

I also hated the way she treated Patrick. He was by far my favourite character - he seemed to have a bit of life to him (no pun intended) whereas all the other characters didn't really seem real to me. Brie is horrible to Patrick again for most of the book and it just got irritating after a while because it's obvious he's trying to help her and she just keeps pushing him away so I was quite glad when he just stopped showing up to help her. Unfortunately, Patrick disappearing means Brie is free to make all sorts of bad decisions so it's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of situation. She won't listen to what Patrick is telling her but she actually needs him there to tell her she's being stupid.

The plot was also a little off for me. We seemed to spend so much time on Brie's need for revenge that all the other plot points seemed a little far fetched. One minute, we're in a city alone with Brie and Hamloaf and then suddenly her dead ex-friend turns up, obviously looking for trouble (but surprise, surprise, Brie doesn't realise). That plot point was really out there and I thought it needed more set up. We spend so much time watching Brie obsess over what she can't change that when we get to the important things like the soul-stealing thing, it just feels confusing because it hasn't been set up well enough earlier on in the book. Likewise the major plot point with Patrick (this is the only plot point I didn't guess until just before it was revealed). All we had to go on was this nightmare that Brie used to have about a motorbike and that was it. There was no set up so it just came out of nowhere which was really disappointing to me because I would have loved to have spent the whole book on this plot point and the history between Brie and Patrick. I think a duel POV would have been so much better - maybe Patrick watching over Brie? I don't know but it was disappointing that so little time was actually spent on what could have been, to me anyway, the entire book.

So while I did enjoy this book there are a lot of things that I didn't like about the book. To me, Patrick was the only like able character in the whole book and the plot needed more work. A relatively quick read but I wouldn't pick it up again.

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