Punch-Drunk Love

When I first acquired this book in June 2019, it was one of many in a sea of Kindle freebies. I left it sitting around uncategorized in the app and never thought about it more than in passing. Believing it was a novelization of the movie of the same name - a movie I haven't actually seen because the premise doesn't interest me - I figured it was worth having while free but probably not worth reading.

Skip ahead to October 2021, and I needed a book with an orange cover for a reading challenge in the M/M Romance Group. Imagine my surprise when this very book was on the list of suggested options! Not only that, but it was apparently written for one of the group's events back in 2014. Suddenly quite curious, I couldn't resist picking it for my orange book in the Read A Rainbow challenge. In fact, I decided to read it first - partly due to the short length, admittedly.

So, here we are now. I've finished reading Punch-Drunk Love, and... Well, I'm not completely sure how I feel about it.

I see so much potential in the prompt and even the story itself, but it didn't come together in quite the cohesive picture I'd hoped. Most of the expected story beats are there, including delving slightly into the sport of kickboxing, but the journey feels disjointed and poorly paced.

The first two chapters, roughly 35% or so, are dreadfully boring. There are one or two bits which kept me going with the promise of more to come, but ultimately it was a slog to get through the beginning. Even a semi-cute encounter in an elevator and a slightly action-focused kickboxing competition couldn't manage to pull me out of the “meh, whatever” reaction I felt during that portion. Afterward, the pace picks up - but too much. Everything from the random hookup in Vegas to the scene which the writing prompt requested in the first place (being accidentally outed when caught having sex in public) is rushed through at the speed of lightning. And, no, that isn't a spoiler; the frontmatter of the ebook contains the original writing prompt, “Umm, our entire kickboxing team just walked in on us. I think we???re OUT now.”

Pacing aside, it was... okay. Not a ringing endorsement, I know, but I was left feeling detached and uninvested even while I could recognize abstractly that the characters were being cute or sexy.

The smutty bits are very wordy, with a little bit of steam but too many breaks for talking or diving into minutiae of inner thoughts to actually class as erotic in my opinion. The concepts were hot, the execution... not so much. Since I can take or leave smut in my romance and I read this one for the story not a sex scene, I don't particularly mind. I'd say it's a plus that the smutty bits weren't cringe-inducing, but if I'd gone into this looking for erotica I'd have been disappointed. Keep that in mind when you're considering this story, so you know what to expect.

The mutual crush was a little bit cute, but most opportunities to portray sexual tension were faded away. At one point, the main characters are flirting with the idea of hooking up during a masked party and one drags the other away to dance. Instead of showing readers the chemistry between them, it fades away and skips right to the middle of a sex scene. Talk about a missed opportunity!

By now, though, you've probably noticed that I haven't mentioned the characters' names. Mostly, it's because there's so little depth to the characterization that I'm not sure it really matters. But this was written in 2014 on the internet, so nobody should be surprised that one is named Derek. He's the love interest and, contrary to the name and timing, not the tall one in the relationship. The focal character is named Oliver Reyes, who I honestly can't mention without diving into a miniature rant on how this story handles matters of race/ethnicity. I tried not to, honest, but now that I'm here and thinking about the topic again...

Allow me to provide you with the status updates I had at 20%...

Reyes is a “vaguely ethnic” surname, apparently. Something about that weirds me out. Maybe the wording? Honestly not sure.

nerd

slightly

When he was five and his family had moved from Portland, Oregon, to Crescent City on the far northern stretch of the California coastline, Oliver had known in the vague ways of childhood that things were somewhat different. He???d always stuck out a little in Crescent City with his slightly ethnic last name and his fascination with things that went pop and fizz. Life was pretty white bread up there??? much more so than in Portland??? and people weren???t always that receptive of the ???other???, despite California???s stereotypically hippy-dippy tendencies.

Gee, I wonder why.

impress

massive assumption

never mentioned again

Oliver himself

identifying

one sentence

unsettling feeling

Diablo

Spanish word

It makes my head hurt

yikes

or know anything about their culture?

still makes me bristle

could

Supernatural

not nerdy

Riverdale

Shadowhunters

cared

wanted

especially

Punch-Drunk Love

existed

2.5 stars

the completely unnecessary addition of Oliver's childhood dog dying from cancer