This Is Why They Hate Us in Rolling with the lgbt

Aug 20, 2022 Eva B. rated it it was amazing

Shelves: metaphorical-tears-were-shed, that-cover-though, queer-leads, friendships-are-magic, young-adult, arcs

Thank you to Kismet Books for the arc! If you're a book lover in the Wisconsin area, swing over to Verona and check them out!

The fact that this is the first book I finished after reading Giovanni's Room and Quique reads that in this...

From the moment I saw the cover, This Is Why They Hate Us was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and the inside lived up to the outside. It is, in many ways, a perfect summer read, although not as thematically light as the books I tend to associate with Thank you to Kismet Books for the arc! If you're a book lover in the Wisconsin area, swing over to Verona and check them out!

The fact that this is the first book I finished after reading Giovanni's Room and Quique reads that in this...

From the moment I saw the cover, This Is Why They Hate Us was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and the inside lived up to the outside. It is, in many ways, a perfect summer read, although not as thematically light as the books I tend to associate with that category. Instead it captures the feelings I have about summer--the feeling of being stuck or adrift or alone. In quite a lot of places, this book read me like, well, a book. The paragraph where Quique is listing all of the people he envies? His mental health struggles? His feelings of attachment to the queer books he's read? I felt so seen.
Quique is an excellent protagonist. He's messy and flawed and makes some horrible decisions, but he grows from them. This is overall a very messy book in the sense that it's about an inherently messy situation: Quique is desperately trying to get with someone so he can get over his crush on his best friend and this leads him to situations that make him feel used or abandoned or even ones that, under different circumstances, could have led to him being in extremely real danger. All of the side characters also felt distinct: Fabiola, Saleem, Manny, Ziggy, and Tyler all leapt off the page, as did Quique's parents. The friendships in this book were so good!! (Psst--Fabiola book when??). The book balances serious discussions around mental illness, bisexuality, biphobia, bi-erasure, being both religious and queer, being in the closet, colonization, and more with moments of genuinely laugh-out-loud funny comedy that doesn't feel out of place.
My one nitpick is that sometimes the way the characters talked seemed a bit too...rehearsed, maybe? Stilted? There's a few points where Quique will give these long speeches to people and I'm like "this is really good, but I don't know if teenagers talk like this in real life?". In some cases it makes sense, like the tiramisu VS dolce de leche analogy (side note: I feel like this analogy in particular is going to be very helpful for queer teens, especially ones who are bi/pan/poly/etc.) but do I believe that a teenager can pull out an AP essay quality discussion on the way that the Everyman trope manifests in queer fiction in response to a question about the name he uses on his dating app bio? Not really. However this is not anywhere near enough for me to drop a star over since the sections that felt stilted were still really well written.
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