Everyone deserves a relationship in which ‘Is this person being vicious or just sarcastic?’ isn’t even a question. If Chloe loves Red, she needs to express herself differently. It’s precisely the kind of self-gaslighting that abusive relationships instil in people. But everything in him rejected the idea that Chloe could ever really be cruel… Maybe he was falling back into bad habits, seeing cruelty as a challenge. Chloe is supposed to read as clever, caustic, and snarky, but instead, she reads as self-absorbed and mean, a disastrous partner for a man recovering from abuse. Everything in that paragraph was actually done or said by the heroine Chloe.Īnd here we hit the problem with this book which was, for me, insurmountable. She “ laughed and hit him on the shoulder with her bag.” Compliments on his appearance involved a glare and a comment like “You know what you look like.” When they were out and bumped into her family, she told them that he was “No one.” After an elderly neighbor accidentally mixed up their building mail slots, she declared that it wasn’t fault that she, incensed by the literal crime committed against her, had reacted in the heat of the moment by finding the old lady’s post box and pouring her morning thermos of tea through the slot. Red Morgan has just exited an abusive relationship in which his ex-girlfriend Pippa was both physically violent and emotionally manipulative.

A friend who also read the book told me, “ She felt to me like a character that would stand in the middle of the room, ignore everyone else there, and yell ME!! at the top of her lungs.” She also has a list of things she wants to experience (I’m so over ‘tick off items on a list’ as a plot device), and major abandonment issues related both to her diagnosis (a douche of a fiancé, rarely mentioned, who ditched her because of her illness) and her narcissism (her college friends have ‘abandoned’ her, which is clearly a Special Thing that only happens to Chloe, and not to 99% of people moving cities after graduation).

Get a life chloe brown cover