Dallas Woodburn

Thanks, Carissa, for Ruining My Life

Roshan Reads

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an eARC of this book in return for an honest review! This review contains spoilers!
My rating of this book fluctuated a bit while I was reading, and I took a pretty big gap in the middle of the book but decided on 2.5 stars .
Thanks, Carissa, For Ruining My Life is a YA romance novel following protagonists Brad and Rose as their lives are ‘ruined’ by Carissa. For Brad, Carissa ruined his life by breaking up with him, for Rose, Carissa sent her on a national weight-loss show called ‘Help Me Lose Weight and Live Again’. I personally think that those two things are not the same, and being dumped before your last year of high school doesn’t really compare to being signed up for a TV show relying on negative perceptions of weight and the idea that being skinny is being healthy, for obvious reasons. Carissa also makes fun of Rose and her weight in front of her friends before trying to justify everything as ‘wanting Rose to be happy’, which is super gross.  
Obviously, this book and the situation Rose is placed in could be a good conversation about how exploitative weight loss shows are and how they capitalise of people being unhappy with themselves, even to the point of damaging their bodies in the pursuit of unrealistic ideals. This is talked about in the book, and Rose talks about how contestants on the same weight loss show she’s currently on are forced to lose dangerous amounts of weight and are considered failures if they can’t keep losing weight at an inhuman rate. <spoiler>At the final weigh-in of the show, Rose does make a speech about how she wants to love her body no matter what it looks like, but that is after she’s lost a heap of weight and gains a single pound one week, disqualifying her from winning.</spoiler>
Brad’s entire problem with Carissa isn’t that she signed him up for a show that relies on fatphobia to excuse inhumane treatment of people, it’s that she dumped him. She even lists her reasons; she thinks that they’re different people, have different interests, and are going different places in life, as well as the fact that she doesn’t love him anymore. While it is revealed later in the book that she dumped him because she was jealous that her relationship with Brad would never be as good as the friendship between Brad and Rose, though Brad doesn’t seem to ever find out about that.
Brad refuses to accept any of that, saying things like “Isn’t everyone ‘different people’?” and even admitting that he doesn’t hand in school work while Carissa is aiming for Stanford. For the first thirty-something percent of the book, Brad just doesn’t let himself believe that the relationship is over with zero chance of getting back together. He spends chapter after chapter making himself a better person just to win Carissa back, even though everything he does benefits him more than it would have benefited Carissa, like arriving to school on time, exercising regularly, reading, getting a position at a local radio station because that’s the field he wants to go into. The grand plan to win Carissa’s love back just seems like Carissa was trying to be a decent girlfriend and encourage Brad to put in the work to have the future he wants. 
Even after he decides that he doesn’t need to do these things for Carissa, it isn’t long before he’s in another sort-of relationship with Meghan, another high school employee at the radio station. This set of events was really what made me feel like the pacing in the book was weird, because it felt like Brad was properly letting go of his past relationship for a week before dating someone else straight away. Maybe this is a personal thing, but deciding you can do things without needing a relationship for motivation only to jump into a new one doesn’t fit the self worth message.
<spoiler>Meghan also turns out to be a pretty bad person, she complains about having to work at a local food pantry handing out food to people who need it. Specifically, she complains about it being unpaid overtime, then she makes a “joke” about “smelly homeless people” and when Brad says that’s not something you should be saying, she says she thought he could “take a joke”. Later on, as Brad and Meghan are driving home, they see a elderly woman who was at the pantry to collect food walking home and Meghan makes a comment about how the woman probably didn’t need the food. Brad breaks up with her in the car and offers the lady a ride home, but later says that he could have seen Meghan being a good work friend. This is right after he gives Rose a big talk about how she was always beautiful, no matter what size she was. </spoiler>
<spoiler>While we’re talking about alternate love interests, Rose also dates Daniel for a while, but decides they’re better off as friends at the Winter Formal, which is when Holly (Rose’s best friend) and Daniel start acting on their feelings after having known each other a week. Daniel had also told Rose that he fell in love with her the second he saw her, too, so…</spoiler>
I know Carissa is the bad guy in this story and she does some horrible things, I almost felt sorry for her in the early Brad chapters. Brad would talk about how he called her a bunch to try and get her back, and how he went to a party and tried to start a fight with a guy kissing his ‘girlfriend’ (who had dumped him, but small details don’t matter apparently), among other things. It gets to the point where Brad tries to confront Carissa about her dumping him live on the school-wide morning announcements and it was truly uncomfortable to read. 
<spoiler>Since we’re on the topic of Carissa, it’s revealed in the last few chapters that she’s been rejected from Stanford, and her only real motivation to date Brad and send Rose on the TV show was that she was jealous of Rose because Rose has always thought Carissa’s shallow interests were below her. I don’t even know where to start with this. I’m just not going to try. </spoiler>
Moving on and continuing on the pacing point, a good forty per cent of this book (yes, almost half) is near-constant miscommunication, which I hated. Brad asks to hang out again, Rose assumes he only wants her on his radio show to ask about the TV show. Brad thinks they’re having a moment, boom, Rose’s reality TV show boyfriend exists. Rose is about to open up about her feelings, boom, Carissa still likes Brad. Brad is about to tell Rose he likes her, boom, he finds a letter from Rose written weeks earlier that tells him to get back with Carissa. Forty per cent of a book is just back and forth like this. Neither of them thinks to text or call the other person, not even a letter. Just assumption after assumption to fill out drama of why they can’t get together. This is after they barely have a single conversation that isn’t a flashback or memory until halfway through the book. 
Towards the end of the book, mostly around the bowling alley and the formal, scenes split, sometimes in the middle of conversations, to switch to the other POV. It’s jarring. I don’t think we needed a sudden switch midway through a conversation to reveal that Brad was thinking the same thing he was thinking a chapter ago. I wouldn’t have minded if scenes happened once and we only got one perspective, but the big kiss at the end is repeated in both POV’s and I don’t think it really added anything that hadn’t already been said. 
Now, for some other things that I didn’t really like but couldn’t find a good place for. 1) Brad hears his parents talking about refinancing their home but brushes it off as ‘boring adult talk’, despite being out of high school and an adult next year. This refinancing ends up being to pay for Brad’s father’s cancer treatments. 2) Brad is out on a date with Meghan. They go to one of Carissa’s favourite cafes, where she usually only orders a tiny salad, despite complaining that she’s starving. But Meghan orders a turkey burger that falls apart in her hands. She’s so different to Carissa (no one escapes the comparisons, not even Rose) but red flag, she thinks the Beatles are overrated and mostly listens to pop-punk or something. However, Rose likes the Beatles and the same music that Brad likes, so it’s fine. 
There were also times when the characters seemed way older than they actually were, or like the book was set at least a decade ago. One example of this is Rose giving Leonardo DiCaprio a nickname after he got big from being in Titanic. A movie that came out in the early to mid-’90s. I am the same age as these characters. I do not remember Leonardo DiCaprio’s career from a decade before I was born. Someone should have read the book to see whether it wasn’t outdated, like the insistence that radio wasn’t dying and that podcasts aren’t going to replace radio. The author’s note at the back of the book says this book was drafted a decade ago, but some changes could have been made. 
I know it seems like I absolutely hated this book, but there were a few things I liked. The dual POV was a good choice for the long-distance sections of the book, even if I wasn’t a fan of Brad. The book wasn’t a super hard read. It only took me a couple of hours to read, and it has a happy ending for the main characters. 
All in all, I don’t know whether I would recommend this book. I am still thankful for the opportunity to read an eARC of the book, but it’s not something I would reread.

Caitlin 

This isn’t my typical genre, it was more targeted towards younger teens, but I did actually enjoy it! It was a sweet read about finding yourself and falling in love. I couldn’t put this down, I read it in one sitting. I just wanted to keep reading and see what happened. 

This is a slow burn and it focuses more on them as individuals for most of the book. I do wish we got to see more of Brad and Rose’s relationship, a few more chapters of them actually together would of been great! 

I loved Rose’s speech during her last weigh in, it was such a good message! 

If you want a quick and easy read that has a great message behind it, give this one a go!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks, Carissa, for Ruining My Life

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