My second 5 star read of the year. It's such a simple duo narrative story, that it holds so much power within. Some character driven novels often forget that plot is still meant to be part of the focus, but this did not disappoint whatsoever and does the C.D. model extremely well. Happy to read more novels from the author!

3.5/5

Disappoint me, by Nicola Dinan, was my first time with the author. What surprised me the most was the beautiful writing, which was probably one of the things that stuck with me the most after reading it.

The novel has dual pov, switching between Max (set in the present) and Vincent’s (set in the past) perspectives. I thoroughly enjoyed how distinct their voices felt and the complexity of each and every character in the narrative. They were far from perfect, yes, but you grew to perhaps not love them, but understand them and their motivations.
For me, this is a story about how (all kinds of) relationships have the potential to help us heal and bring out the best in us, but it is unsustainable to expect them to be a solution to everything we’re struggling with in life and within ourselves.

I did sometimes struggle a bit with the pacing, as well as with a feeling of disconnectedness from the characters, as if watching them from a distance. Nonetheless, I had a very positive experience with Dinan and I am curious to read her previous novel, as the author has a fascinating way to portray human relationships and the subject of queering institutions and futures.

Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Books, for the ARC copy of the book.

i really enjoyed this novel. the duel perspectives was so important to this novel and i loved that the novel incorporated that! i loved the writing style and the way this author brought the story to life! the characters had so much depth! a story that will sick with me long after the last page.

I truly enjoyed Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan. It was narrated primarily by Max, a trans woman who is in a relationship with a man who has some history he needs to work through, which is the other timeline present in the narrative. Although the prose is understated, and very literary, I found myself truly enjoying the characters' journeys and wanting to know what happened next.

Max's voice and narration was truly brilliant, I found her voice to be funny, irreverent but extremely thoughtful. The relationships she has with her family and friends are truly led with empathy and love. I wanted to know more about her daily life outside of the events in this book.

I'd recommend this book for fans of literary fiction, primarily a Sally Rooney vibe (in my opinion).

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I couldn't put this book down. I didn't really know what to expect given I've never read any of Dinan's other work, and to be honest the book's tagline (especially the "trad wife" bit) felt a bit clickbaity given how the story actually happened. But I'm so glad for that because I *loved* this book. The writing was amazing and had me hooked from the beginning, and engaged fully the whole time even with the changing timelines and perspectives. I was expecting a book about messy characters being irresponsible, but instead got a deeply thoughtful and hopeful story about forgiveness. Given the title, I was wondering who would be disappointing who, but it seems like it was everyone, all the time, in ways small and big. No character in this story is flawless, and I also didn't come away hating (almost?) any of them. They're all complicated and I love what the book has to say about change and forgiveness and sticking to our morals.

Thank you to Netgalley and The Dial Press for the chance to read and review this ARC.

I was locked into this book from start to finish. Nicola Dinan does an incredible job of inviting you into a slice of life of two people as they start dating. As their worlds open up to each other and they meet each other's friends and family, we see how their backgrounds impact their relationship. Don't go into this book thinking you'll either love or hate certain characters, instead think of them as incredibly human-- still capable of fucking up, still having to confront their mistakes, and still able to love and be loved.

Told in dual timelines and points-of-views, we follow Max as she's going through a pivotal change in her life and she starts dating Vincent. We also have Vincent in the past on a trip he took to Thailand when he was a young adult and a relationship that changed many aspects of his life.

This book covers difficult topics but also offers nuggets of comedic relief with Max and Vincent's friends and family. Full of conflict and forgiveness, this novel left me pondering how much we are willing to forgive the ones we love for their past mistakes, and more so, do we even have the right to offer that forgiveness?

A queer/lgbt literary fiction (and light romance?) about a trans poet who falls for a corporate lawyer, both carrying their own baggage into their relationship. We alternate POVs, current day poet Max and past lawyer Vincent. Vincent is attracted to trans women but struggles with his sexuality and how others will perceive him.

This had such great conversations about being trans, being trans in a relationship, and on the opposite end being in a relationship with a trans person. I really appreciated that we got Vincent's POV, getting into his head and his insecurities about his attraction to trans women, societal expectations, being perceived as gay, having his straight friends judge him, etc.

I loved the writing and the nuanced characters. Highly recommend for fans of literary fiction / lgbt stories.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy for review.

very cool romance/literary work about identity, history, very strong dual narrative and Max was an awesome character. Vincent was slightly less developed but not underdeveloped. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

I felt like this book was kind of all over the place and not in a fun way! The marketing of “fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife” isn’t really accurate at all. I enjoyed the shift in perspective between Max and Vincent, but the brain tumor plot seemed to come out of nowhere and it felt disjointed and like there was too much going on.

Thank you for the ARC!!

A rather simple story told beautifully, Disappoint Me is about Max, a transwoman living in London and Vincent, a guy she meets online after some past romantic failures. Told in a dual timeline - the present in London about Max and Vincent’s relationship and the past about Vincent’s gap year in Thailand - the story focuses on relationships between lovers, friends, families, on forgiveness and on how the world still views trans people. It was a good read, I’d definitely recommend it.

This was my second book by Nicola Dinan, and I was just as quickly captivated by the storyline as I was with the first. Her remarkable talent for bringing these intricate characters to life, coupled with her captivating dual timeline, made this a truly enjoyable read. Max was a captivating character, and I thoroughly enjoyed delving into her intricate relationships.

I will eagerly continue to follow Dinan’s work to discover what her next story holds.

I am grateful to the publisher for providing me with the opportunity to read this upcoming novel.

I had been in a relationship with someone for just over ten years when I woke up one morning, opened my eyes and knew that things needed to come to a close. By any stretch of the imagination, there was nothing wrong with the relationship at all. We had been living together for quite some time, we were comfortable, we had a routine, we were coasting. “No alarms and no surprises,” as the man once sang. But in a relationship that had been borne from our shared creativity and our determination to see our creative goals blossom, we had stopped challenging each other, we had stopped daring each other to push harder and to do more. By the end of that day, most of my things were already in boxes ready to move forward and away.

Disappoint Me begins with a fall. A literal fall down a flight of stairs at a New Year’s party. It’s the kind of fall that, as you read about it, you can picture it in your head, both from the outside perspective of those witnessing it, as well as firmly ensconced in the mind of the heroine at the heart of the story, Max. It’s the kind of fall that as it’s happening to you, it feels as if decades pass until you reach the end. It’s the kind of fall that has a singular moment of clarity when you land that lasts a mere second for onlookers, but for you extends the length of eternity as you find the space to examine your current place in life, the choices that you’ve made to arrive at this place and the choices that you will need to make to escape this place. It’s the kind of fall that forces you to wake up and walk away.

For Max, it’s the kind of fall that subconsciously allows her to drift away from the extreme highs and lows of the never-ending party that is the artistic, queer London party scene of her twenties as she meets Vincent, a somewhat slick, somewhat rigid, but kind and attentive corporate lawyer after the two match on a dating app. Max is a published poet that’s struggled to find the words and the will to pen another poetry collection as she “falls back” on her career as a lawyer spending her days being the secret, uncredited voice behind an AI law app. After being mired in the muck of a five year relationship with a fellow writer more attuned to his own ego and the coif of his hair, Max is unfamiliar with attention from a partner that feels honest and considerate rather than conditional and transactional.

But Max, a trans woman just having crossed over into her thirties, has doubts about Vincent’s intentions and her own feelings towards someone that wasn’t spawned from the same literary and art scene that is the foundation of most of her social circle. As the relationship deepens and their lives become more intertwined and involved, Max marvels at how easily she slipped into a relationship that feels more heteronormative without even trying, at one point remarking “fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife” as she takes in the surroundings and trappings that she and Vincent have built together.

The narration of Disappoint Me alternates between that of Max in the current day and with Vincent at the age of nineteen as he’s in the midst of a gap year that finds him with a plan to travel to meet his childhood best friend in Thailand. Nicola Dinan does a masterful job at creating two distinctly unique voices in her two narrators as Max reads as deeply intelligent, witty and self-effacing (almost Fleabag-esque in her mannerisms and voice) whereas the younger version of Vincent comes across as exactly what you would expect of a young man with the means to experience a year travelling the world with very few limits, if any.

As their relationship deepens, their separate worlds collide as family issues arise on both sides when Max’s brother announces that he’s about to become a father despite having ended his own relationship with the mother several months previously and Vincent’s father suffers a massive heart attack that shocks the entire family and sets Vincent into action to help care for his ailing father. Interspersed with the story of their blossoming relationship, the events of Vincent’s gap year abroad in Thailand with his best friend and a mysterious woman named Alex slowly come to light that paint Vincent in a much different and more sinister light than the man currently holding a grip on Max’s heart and call into question his reasons for wanting to be with Max in the first place.

Where Disappoint Me shines is in the time that it spends luxuriating in conversations between it’s characters. Max’s family and her best friend, Simone, are a particular delight to share time with as each interaction with them exposes some new layer of their complicated relationships with each other. Nicola Dinan revels in crafting scenes that expose the raw nerves of tense situations and lets you sit inside of them just long enough to grasp and experience the awkward, awful feelings that can arise when dealing with family trauma, distrust and the pain that comes with trying to adjust to adulthood.

After finishing my time with Disappoint Me, I had the chance to read through a few interviews with Nicola Dinan and discovered that not only is she currently working on her third novel in which she genre jumps over to sci-fi, but that she’s already in the planning stages for her fourth novel. In other words, we will be eating extremely well for the foreseeable future in regards to this remarkable new voice in literature.

I’d like to thank The Dial Press, Random House Publishing Group, NetGalley and or course, Nicola Dinan for the opportunity to read and review an advanced copy of this stunning new novel.

Disappoint Me did not disappoint me at all!
This books writing was very well done throughout the duel narratives and different timelines. Brought to life is a story of a trans women's journey through her 3o's and taking a go at a heteronormative relationship.
As chaotic as Max was introduced to us, I could not help but love her. This is definitely all to do with the great writing and story telling by Nicola Dinan.
As this is my first book by this author I have been seeing hype for another one of her works called Bellies so I will definitely have to check that one out!

Max is a 30 year old transgender woman and poet with a law degree working as an AI Robot and she just started dating Vincent, a multicultural corporate lawyer who can’t stomach telling his dad that he’s dating a trans woman.

We get dual pov’s here where Max’s chapters are set in London 2023 navigating old and new relationships and Vincent’s are in 2012 on a gap year trip to Thailand, making mistakes that are bound to follow him into the future.

I was first impressed by how real this felt. I recognize these scenarios and feelings. And having someone put them into words feels like home. Vincent's multicultural struggles are parallel to my own and exploring your heritage is rarely an adventure, it’s hard and heavy.

The book is also very funny, without being comedic. It’s funny the way life is funny and it feels effortless without feeling like it’s set up or trying too hard.
It’s poignant and raw, screaming with millennial angst, regret and nostalgia for the future.
Dinan has a talent for writing complex characters, they felt so real to me. Their insecurities, their shame, their longing and wanting for something they can’t quite put their finger on. I was completely engrossed in their stories.
If you’ve ever felt lost and confused about life, this book is a great companion. It won’t give you direction or a lecture, but it will show you that you’re not alone.
Highly recommend!

** A copy of Disappoint Me was provided by the publisher and NetGalley/Edelweiss+ in exchange for an honest review **

I loved Nicola Dinan's Bellies and I was so excited to get an ARC of Disappoint Me. Disappoint Me does not disappoint. While Bellies was about the messiness of your post-university life and early 20s, Disappoint Me is about the messiness of your late 20s and early 30s. It tackles a range of issues such as gender identity, relationships, forgiveness, friendship and family dynamics. I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish the last quarter of the book. Nicola Dinan is a very skilled writer - there are so many sections I underlined and will keep going back to. I can't wait for what she does next. She's one to watch and has quickly become one of my favourite authors.

4.5 stars!

I read this book because of Torrey Peters quoted praise in the NetGalley description (p.s. thank you to the publisher for approving my request). Having read Detransition, Baby and the digital arc of Stag Dance (eternally grateful for that as well), I more than trust Torrey Peters as a writer and so I took a chance on her as a reviewer. And I'm glad I did!

Disappoint Me was a really great modern romance (not least in part because it had so much more than the relationship between its two leads, Max and Vincent), sharing the touching, the mundane, and the complicated moments of a burgeoning relationship through to the moments when it becomes really tested. These moments are interspersed with the other going-ons of Max's life, including her job, her friendship with Simone, who she has known since before she transitioned and before Simone came out as a lesbian, and who has had her back always, and her participation in an old school friends wedding party. It's this combination of focuses, where Max's life is shown not to be driven exclusively by and toward love, with every subplot somehow carrying her magically closer to Vincent, but where instead love simply figures as the important thing it is for her, that makes the book work as a romance (which, yes, is silly to hone in on, the love I mean, after mentioning how important it is that Max had more going on in her life but alas, you get it. It's how every Jane Austen novel is also something more.)

The more that's going on is wonderful though, and no matter how the story ends (which I will remain mum on to keep interested parties in suspense), getting to watch Max move and change through the novel and hearing her thoughts is rewarding and well worth the read.

While you get to experience Max's present, Vincent's chapters come in from the past, hinting at some major event to be revealed that will shake up what Max and Vincent are to each other. There are hints of this subtly laid about in the present, and comparing past Vincent to current Vincent, who is much more emotionally and mentally mature, while getting these little blips popping up gives a really interesting, real example of how a person can change and not change over time.

There's more to talk about and dig in on, and a lot of this book is about how much the past affects the present and the future, but I don't want to say much more than the vague blah I've shared here. I will add that any doubt I might have had about this book was quashed when Max heard the line "Strange how a phone call can change your day, take you away," from Labi Siffre and thought it was one of the most beautiful lyrics ever written. Because I agree.

I had never heard of Nicola Dinan, but as soon as I saw the absolutely hilarious cover art and was immediately like "Hey, she looks how I feel!", I knew that this was a book I had to read, even if I had to wait until May when it's officially released. I was so lucky and thankful to be granted an arc of this! I expected (or rather really, really wanted) to love this book, and.......it was even better than I had hoped!!

Nicola Dinan is a master storyteller. Right from the jump, I was completely hooked and obsessed with Max and her friends, and I especially loved the setting- New Years in London! Max’s New Year’s resolution, you ask? Well, to find a boyfriend:!

The main narration is told from Max in 2023, but we also get glimpses into the man of the hour Vincent’s perspective during a pivotal gap year trip to Thailand back in 2012. I enjoyed both timelines in equal measure. Dinan has a gift for creating characters that really leap off the page, and needless to say, I was utterly gripped from start to finish.

The social commentary was also spot on and Dinan's emotionally charged storytelling didn't miss a single time.

"Disappoint Me" is incredibly witty, fiery, and fierce, Thank you so much to NetGalley, Nicola Dinan, and Random House for the arc!

Kind of boring. But the writing was beautiful.

I feel like I can’t really give much feedback because I don’t think I fully grasped what was going on. This sign really a book I would pick up, so it was better than I was expecting. But it also doesn’t stand out to me. This book doesn’t make me want to drop everything I’m doing and read more like it.

But I do applaud the author for not only finishing this book, but having a gorgeous writing style.

An emotional and reflective exploration of the relationships that have built us, and continue to shape us. Nicola Dinan writes characters with such depth and the (at times) painful reality that our flaws and experiences make us so human. The main characters Max and Vincent possess very distinct voices, moving us through their stories along with their friends and families. Many complex topics are covered and some of the characters make terrible, devastating decisions- and they must ask themselves and each other, "Should I forgive? What does forgiveness look like?".

Despite the heavy themes, there is a charm and a hopefulness that permeates this story. I will be thinking about it for a good while! I am looking forward to reading more from Nicola Dinan! Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the ARC.

Dinan did an amazing job of writing a compelling story about identity and relationships through a queer and trans lens. The two main characters’ flaws moved the story along and created a poetic story of love, betrayal and acceptance. I wasn’t 100% sure how I would feel in the beginning but I quickly grew to love the characters and was deeply invested in this raw and realistic depiction that makes it relatable but still entertaining and eye opening. The ending left me with so many questions which can be poetic in a sense, but left me wanting more!