The Love Interest (Review)

The Love Interest by Cale Dietrich
Genre: Young Adult/Contemporary/LGBTQIA+
Format: Hardcover
Page Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Publication Date: July 25, 2017

About The Love Interest (via Goodreads):

There is a secret organization that cultivates teenage spies. The agents are called Love Interests because getting close to people destined for great power means getting valuable secrets.

Caden is a Nice: the boy next door, sculpted to physical perfection. Dylan is a Bad: the brooding, dark-souled guy who is dangerously handsome. The girl they are competing for is important to the organization, and each boy will pursue her. Will she choose the Nice or the Bad?

Both Caden and Dylan are living in the outside world for the first time. They are well-trained and at the top of their games. They have to be—whoever the girl doesn’t choose will die.

What the boys don’t expect are feelings that are outside of their training. Feelings that could kill them both.

One of the things that I look for in a great book is an overall message and meaning behind the narrative.  While I love books that I can consume for fun wholeheartedly, I love books that give commentary on issues and strive to convey something to the greater world.  It’s why one of my favorite genres is satire, and why I will defend Kill The Boy Band to the grave.  So when I heard about Cale Dietrich’s The Love Interest, I was so excited to hear his take on tired YA tropes and novel cliches.

Most of his plays strike at the paranormal novels from around 2012, like Fallen and Hush, Hush (*shivers in disgust*) or really any YA novel published after Twilight and before, let’s say, 2015, with a heterosexual romance.  And in the first few chapters, Dietrich does this very well - like, at the level of a 4 star book.  He’s a master at worldbuilding, and he establishes clear views of the world inside and outside the LIC.  He tackles topics such as male self-consciousness and comments on the love interest’s true role in a story, showing how unrealistic and paper-thin they need to be constructed to serve their greater narrative.

But as soon as Caden meets Juliet, everything falls apart - his plans, himself, and this darn book.  Dietrich seems to juggle way too much throughout the entire story between Caden’s inner thoughts and the storylines of literally everyone else involved.  It suffered a massive case of identity crisis, and couldn’t recover itself to match the quality from the first few chapters.

First of all, Caden is an annoying little turd.  I couldn’t sympathize with his struggles but I still felt for him as a person.  Additionally, in the grand scope of things he does some pretty stupid stuff.  The book’s biggest problem is that Dietrich writes the story from Caden’s point of view the entire time, and his thoughts and prose at times seemed to be overwhelming, heavy, and too dramatic.  I personally think it would have been better to have an alternating perspective from both Caden and Dylan to capitalize on the great world-building skills Dietrich had shown in the LIC.

To add on that point, all the characters were passable at most.  Dylan and Juliet were both interesting characters that I would have preferred to hear from a bit more.  Trevor and Natalie were the most useless characters in this entire novel.  Note: I had to look through reviews on Goodreads to find their names, if that says anything.  They were poorly written and unnecessary, and ultimately serve the story more than themselves.  Frankly, Trevor and Natalie were utilized in very cliche ways (I won’t say further for spoiler reasons), which is sad because this is exactly what the author is trying to avoid doing.  Also, Caden’s coach (I think her name is Kaycee, but when I tried to look through review’s again I couldn’t find anything, which should also say lots of things) was honestly really annoying.  And for that matter their whole communication process was just so plain unrealistic that it was jarring.

The third act is just such a colossal mess I kinda felt secondhand embarrassment.  It felt like a completely different novel.  The best that I can compare how I felt is when I watched Kingsman: The Secret Service after their church scene; I was ON BOARD but my parents felt like the movie took a complete 180 degree turn.  But in this case, I was my parents.  

By far the biggest problem with this book is that it really didn’t know what it wanted to be.  It was very well-written but just all over the place.  It tried to be 10% of a satire, which it tossed out the window fairly quickly; a sexy thriller, which wasn’t often steamy but those moments were SO CHARGED that it seemed like there was TOO MUCH of it; and, most importantly, just a really good, unique, original LGBT love story, where it ended up being a cliche tale falling into the same traps it was originally criticizing.

I’d like to think that The Love Interest tried really hard not to be cliche, but that’s where it fails the most.  It had an interesting concept but sadly couldn’t really deliver, falling back into the old habits of YA novels of past.

My Rating: 2.5 stars