AR Wile, $0.99, ISBN 978-1989324592
Contemporary Romance, 2022
This version of AR Wile’s Tragically Broken has been revised. Compared to the 2018 and 2020 editions, this one boasts over 20,000 more words. More value for money, I guess?
I suppose those words are necessary, because this is marketed as a new adult story, and hence, there are many melodramatic proclamations of how one is so broken inside and how the other person is so perfect and awesome, and hence they are all going to hug themselves and listen to sad songs on an endless loop.
WE WERE TWO PEOPLE who couldn’t have been more different. She was the good girl; I was the bad boy. I was everything she shouldn’t have wanted. And she was everything I didn’t know I needed.
I was broken. She was perfect.
See what I mean?
We were two people bonded in tragedy. He was the mysterious saviour. I was the one saved.
I was broken. He was perfect.
Didn’t this kind of thing died out a few years ago, when everyone got bored of these dreary mopes and moved on to new adult fantasy instead?
Gavin and Hannah are two walking car wrecks. The first few chapters enumerate every tragedy and trauma that ever exists hitting these two like a truck carrying several tons of Catherine Anderson novels for the landfill suddenly instead ramming into them and causing the crates of books to fall onto everyone hard.
Oh, and they are also secretly talented and smart and awesome, as well as sexier than you and me. Mind you, their talent brings them nothing but grief. Their popularity brings them nothing but disappointments. Being desired brings them nothing but a starring role as the victim in the latest Lifetime ooh-a-psycho-is-after-you movie.
This thing has 45 chapters of constant misery. 45, yes. The whole thing is just too much, because this is the equivalent of an idiot on TikTok pretending that they are plain just because they have dark eyeliners or a strand of hair out of place, and spending two whole months whining about how oppressed and hard they have it.
Tragically Broken is tragically contrived, as drama happens so often, so relentlessly and incessantly, that this thing soon resembles a Looney Tunes cartoon masquerading as trauma porn.
It is also tragically clichéd, because everything here can be found in similarly uninspired manner in other generic, by-the-numbers new adult stories of this sort.
Oh, and it is tragically joyless, resembling every horrible soap opera on CW that didn’t know when to stop and just went on and on and on for some reason.
No, this is worse than Riverdale, because that show at least stopped giving a flying fig about anything and just went balls out with insanity from the third season onward—nine levels of hell for the increasingly aged and miserable-looking cast, yes, but pure sideshow entertainment for people taking perverse pleasure in how horrible the show is to both the cast and the concept of good taste.
Gavin and Hannah can only dream of starring in such glorious train wreck. No, they are stuck in a crash of clown cars instead.
This one is the first entry in an ongoing series, by the way. Imagine: a whole series of hot, beautiful, talented people whining about how sad their lives are. Sadly, I don’t have the stamina or willpower to enjoy their company beyond this thing.
