Review: Blindsighted by Amy Daws
I need to get better at knowing who to take recommendations from. I only picked this book up because I saw a cute TikTok about it. Clearly, I should have done more research or just let myself DNF this book.
I did start out mostly having a good time with this book; I thought the first few pages were cute. I liked the first few glimpses of Freya as a character and her relationship with her best friend Mac; unfortunately, after those few pages, things went downhill quickly for me.
This book is about Freya, a "slightly chubby" Cornish 29-year-old seamstress and aspiring plus-sized fashion designer and her sort of secret best friend Mac, a Scottish football player. The pair live in London and have been hanging out platonically together for about a year. After a drunken game of never have I ever at a party, Mac discovers that Freya is a virgin and offers to help her change that if she's interested.
Starting off, I have to assume that this author did not run any of this book by an English person or a Scottish person. This book has British folks using quite a bit of very noticeable American phrases, and her use of British slang is occasionally bizarre. A small example was her talking about kill shelters, which just isn't really a translatable concept, and a quick google search would have told the author this. It seems like poor research skills and often pulled me out of the story due to bafflement.
A small issue I had with this book is that it is not marked as connected to any of the author's previous books, but it becomes apparent the more you read that this is a spin-off story. That is totally fine, but there were little moments that I thought were insensitive and clumsy that I later assumed were references to previous books. Namely, the way one woman talked about her partner's previous suicide attempt. The author links this woman's love to this man no longer being suicidal, which I found deeply troubling. I also hated the one mention of a gay person in this book, Freya and her ex-boyfriend were completely naked and about to engage in adult activities when this man came out to her. This anecdote is never brought up again and seemed unnecessary.
On to a more overarching issue I had with this book, I hated the way Daws talked about Freya's body and relationship with food. At first, I thought this was going to be a fun story with a fat protagonist; Freya is nicknamed Cookie by Mac, and she thinks, "What a treat for me. The chubby girl gets a food nickname," and I thought I was going to like the direction of this storyline. The author is very clear that Freya is chubby but not too chubby, she's deeply insecure about her body, and the author does not meaningfully work to unpack any of this. Freya has lost weight by the epilogue, but don't worry, she's not too thin. The whole book seemed like Daws thought she was writing a body-positive narrative but has a severe misunderstanding of what that means.
Freya is a bit inconsistent in her characterization. For most of the book, she is pretty childish; she calls sex "The sex," knows so little about the topic that it seems literally impossible that she has ever watched anything rated over PG, and is too embarrassed to even talk about having never had sex. Then suddenly, she is a sex goddess who is very comfortable making sex jokes with old men she just met. It was confusing.
The conflict in this book felt very hollow. The first half of the book feels like the conflict is so artificial as to not matter at all; I did not feel any tension or worry about this couple at all. As the book goes on, we add an external source of conflict that felt very tacked on. I really wish the author had dug deeper into their emotional conflict and made that a bigger part of the story. Especially because we are shown Mac having had a sexual relationship with a past female friend, Cami, (whose sexual relationship has been over for more than a year), and he drops her the moment he starts having sex with Freya. This should have been a massive red flag in multiple ways, but could have added to Freya's worry that the friendship would end when the physical relationship did. Instead, it is meant to be a positive step in their relationship; I really did not like this.
Repeatedly Mac stops Freya from in the middle of dates to prevent her from being around other men; I hated this. The humiliation Freya feels when this happens is never addressed, and I think it was meant to be attractive to the reader.
This book just did not work for me emotionally, I didn't like the writing style, and I thought the plot was overly flimsy. The book did not work for me; I shall now move on to books I shall hopefully like more.
