Beautiful You

I always love Chuck's stuff, but even I have to admit he's wandering into cartoonish territory here. This story is a very blunt object. I will give him credit though. The beginning of this book almost reads like he's trying to write about as normal a character as he can conceive. But then it gets Chuck, and then it gets kind of goofy.

✦ thoroughly enjoyed this from start to end ✦ i mean it's *inhales* a book about how sex toys dominated the world causing a global battery crisis among females and rendering men obsolete, and *exhales* ✦ im a simple mentally unstable girl, and so 5 stars ✦ it's 2023 and i need to read this again for deeper takes (probably)

I don't even know how to review this book. It was so ridiculous, but I think it was actually making fun of itself. Penny was a fun character, and despite how ridiculous the story was, I really wanted to know how it would end.

Wait, wasn't this like an episode of Sex and the City? When the girls get their Rabbits and don't want to go out anymore to meet guys? Oh no, because that TV show didn't venture into CP's crazy town where woman have nothing better to do than pleasure themselves 24/7. Seriously. Nothing better? This sad book is an interesting concept or one liner that was force-fed to balloon it to novel length but without the velvety smoothness of pate. I found it repetitive and, frankly, not at all up to his usual fare. Now, where can I buy model 142X?

Apparently it's not enough for Palahniuk to contribute yet another extended male rape fantasy to my local library - he also manages to make it almost unreadably flimsy, two-dimensional, and unbelievable. The characters are flat, the prose is flat, the plot is so typical in its lack of subtlety that it totally fails to titillate or shock. While reading this, I could imagine that perhaps the author thought he was doing women a favour in writing it. Or maybe it's just a huge send-up. Either way, I feel a bit sorry for him because this book is so embarrassingly bad. Because I cannot rate this less than one star, I am compelled to find something redeeming about this book - I guess all the nanotechnology stuff was pretty cool and could've been put to better use in a story about literally anything other than the topic Palahniuk knows the least about (women). He published this in 2014? What the fuck is a diaphragm?

What can I saw about a book that has a banana vibrator on the front? Totally subversive, hilarious, and dark dark dark, this is a great new novel by Chuck Palahniuk that turns the erotic genre on its head. I appreciated seeing how an actual controlling relationship between two sexual partners really played out, unlike the fantasy ones in more "pop-y" erotica titles where the woman can always change the man because she is THE one. The ending was so strange, but hey, it's Palahniuk. **Reviewed from a digital ARC received from www.netgalley.com. Thank you!