But, what felt like a largely fruitless endeavour, suddenly turned fruitful — we now have too many tomatoes to know what to do with. Everyday, one or both of us will head out and pluck ten, fifteen, little tomatoes, and sometimes, a big heirloom (I think they’re heirloom?) tomato. One night, I don’t really know why, we went on a frenzied hunt for orange tomatoes, filling up my folded up pyjama shirt and giggling maniacally. It was so cold, light rain was falling, my teeth were chattering, but I felt a wave of familiarity that this jittery excitement is akin to the feeling you get hunting for Easter eggs on Sunday morning.

The rest of our vegetables are going well (thanks for asking) but tomatoes will always be what I’m most excited about. When my auntie used to bring us a colander full of baby tomatoes from her garden on the weekends, I would slowly eat all of them, popping them into my mouth in quick succession until mum took them away from me.

So naturally, when the large bowl we set on the table to ripen our picked tomatoes began to fill up to a pleasing level, of course I started sending pictures to everyone I knew. Or everyone I knew who would appreciate our plentiful harvest.

‘Look at our tomatoes 😌 we grew them 🍅’

‘wow!’

‘wow!’

‘woah!!’

Yesterday, I sent a picture1 to a friend, and after complementing our tomatoes, she suggested I try this recipe:

She said I can ‘make it with my house-made bread and home-grown tomatoes’. My first reaction to the recipe was omg that looks so good I’m gonna make it tomorrow. But then! I looked at the recipe! And! It didn’t even say what kind of furikake to use.

I pointed this out to my friend and she said ‘just use what white people use. lol’ and I was like I legitimately wouldn’t even know what white people use. Furikake has long been a fairly untainted Japanese food (Condiment? Seasoning? Sprinkle?) where not that many white people are raving about it online, so I was kind of unbothered in my furikake consumption2. I don’t know what flavour is most popular, so truly, I was like what even furikake do I use for this?

And so, I took this as an opportunity to make furikake toast in the mornings, yes on my house-made sourdough and with my homegrown tomatoes, using all the different flavours in my current collection3. And, to make this substack post telling you all about my favourite furikakes.

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What is Furikake?

Furikake or 振り掛け literally means ‘to sprinkle over’. So I guess they are sprinkles. Savoury sprinkles. Ordinarily, you put them on rice, especially when it’s a side dish. It’s also a large feature of ochazuke - which is basically tea flavoured soggy rice. There’s all different flavours and varieties, where they’re usually a mixture of freeze dried meat or protein4 products mixed with sesame seeds, nori, salt and probably a good amount of MSG. The proteins, especially fish may have been cooked down with soy sauce to create the rich flavour. I had to wikipedia all this by the way, all I knew was that furikake is yummy flaky things that go on the rice.

So now that I’ve explained, here are my favourite furikake:

のりたま（Noritama）

GOATED NORITAMA GOAT E D. I swear I will be eating noritama until the day I die. It is and always will be my favourite.

Noritama just means seaweed and egg, tama short for tamago, egg. The bits of egg and pleasingly and unnaturally yellow, there are sesame seeds (I think?) and it just makes for an all out delicious and lovely rice eating experience.

I’m not wholly sure, but I think that noritama is mostly known to be the furikake for children - no restaurant is serving rice with noritama. A dead giveaway that it’s not really meant for adults is that the most popular packet features little cartoon chickens walking along.

But not all noritama is created equal. Not all have as delicious a ratio of egg bits to nori as this one. I’ve tried others, and they do not compare. So if you’re looking to try it, please look for this one.

Recommended use:

I really enjoy adding this to a bowl of rice topped with a fried or soft-boiled egg. A bit of soy sauce, sesame oil, spring onions and noritama? Delicious for any meal, especially breakfast or a lazy dinner5.

ゆかり (Yukari)

Yukari feels like a very fancy thing to put on rice. It’s almost alarmingly purple colour comes from the dried red shiso, which is mixed with salt, sugar and plum vinegar. It’s slightly sour and salty taste works very well with the almost nutty flavour profile of Japanese rice, adding a touch of freshness.

Whenever my mum put yukari on my rice, she would put a tiiiiiny little sprinkling on top. No more than maybe 20 visible flakes of shiso. It’s such a small amount that you can have one mouthful of rice with the furikake and that’s it. The rest is plain rice, not that I don’t like a good bowl of plain rice. Maybe this is just the normal thing to do with yukari, but I really can’t get enough of the vinegary, citrusy flavour. So now, it’s my house and I can sprinkle as much yukari as I damn well please.

This is the furikake that I tried with tomato on toast. It was good, but ironically, I think I could have added more.

たらこ (Tarako)

Tarako was a pretty regular rotation in my childhood, but I had largely forgotten about it until recently. I bought it again and was like oh yes I remember this flavour. Tarako being pollock roe has a very strong fishy flavour. So if you’re not into that, maybe don’t get this one. But I love it’s almost nutty, salty deep flavour and I think you can also get a mentaiko version as well which is spicy.

My mum says that this furikake is her favourite - so maybe when no one’s looking she loads up her rice with this bad boy.

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Honourable Mentions

Honourable mentions because these aren’t furikake but they are rice toppings.

納豆 (Natto)

Natto seems to be some kind of rite of passage into being accepted by Japanese people and honestly, fair enough. It’s one of Japan’s more ‘gross’ foods, which, understandable, but I love it.

I love the contrast between the cold saltiness of the sticky beans and the warm rice. Sometimes, when I eat this I will put this on my bowl of rice, eat it with the top layer of the rice, and then put furikake on after. Two rice toppings for the price of one!

In the mornings spent at my Auntie’s house in Japan, my obaachan would laboriously load four packets of natto into a bowl and crack a couple of eggs in it, the little packets of sauce (honestly I don’t even know what kind of sauce it is, but it’s yummy), the mustard and chopped spring onions, and whip around a pair of chopsticks until it was nice and frothy.

梅干し (Umeboshi)

Umeboshi, my love. What can I say about umeboshi that would bring it justice.

There are two types of umeboshi, I think, one is with honey and the other is without. I have always had the honey one which is sour with a touch of sweetness. Sometimes I am given umeboshi that isn’t the honey one and my face puckers at the shock of sourness.

Of course, umeboshi is delicious on rice - you have to break it up and spread it through out so you get little pockets of the sweet sourness. It also is a very common onigiri filling, but watch out for the seed. I really enjoy putting them in the broth I make for cold soba or somen for a little citrusy freshness.

Thank you for reading - I realised that this is my first post of 2026!

I think finding happiness and connecting memories to food is such a joyful thing. This also acts as a little sneak peak into ’s first edition 😼

If you haven’t already subscribed to Perfectionism Antidote’s sister publication and my current project, please do!! You can find out more about it at this post.

Cassiopeia Media

Welcome to Cassiopeia!

Welcome to Cassiopeia - the mail club zine that will bring you joy everyday ✨…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Akira Kerr

That’s all from me ~ see you next time :))

I think that Frankie Mag is incredibly cute, and has been building their legacy as the magazine for the whimsy woman for decades. My introduction to the publication was when I a child and my aunt bought me a little book for crafting ideas that was a spin off of the magazine. Then I totally forgot about it for like 10 years, but upon being the editor of our student magazine, I became very passionate about print media so started to buy it regularly.

Actually I lied. The reason I started to buy it was that before I went in to interview for an internship last year I was killing time in a bookshop beforehand, and happened upon a copy of Frankie’s current issue, and thought ‘hmm I bet they’re gonna ask me what kind of publications I like, and I don’t think my current repertoire fits the bill’. So I bought a copy. Sure enough the question was asked. Performative Frankie buying led me to this point. Holly, if you’re reading this, I am sorry.

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Then, having bought every copy since my act of fraud (and enjoying them), this year I was gifted a subscription to the magazine for my birthday by my friend. It was a wonderful gift; receiving the package in the mail every two months was one of the purest joys I have had this year. I love the style of Frankie, in design and content - I like how they take stories from just about anyone and no topic is too niche. But, as the year wore on, I started to feel like this publication wasn’t really for me - it felt like it was for white millennial+ women, which should have been obvious by the testimonials at the beginning of the magazine. But still, there’s a certain undertone throughout that makes me feel this way.

The first time I felt a slight gross feeling was when they put a spread of Japan travel photos in an issue. for the SECOND TIME IN LIKE 6 MONTHS. The second one was arguable more ok than the first appearance because it was a woman who was capturing her visit to her Japanese husband’s hometown, but was there no editorial decision to maybe not do the same thing like, three issues apart? It just feels like as soon as Japan is mentioned it doesn’t matter, it’s going in the spread.

But, as I’ve said before, or at least a version of it, the love for Japan and its ‘culture’ is shallow, performative and blatantly consumerist. Orientalism, I’m afraid to say, is alive and well.

Today, I was perusing the mag’s Summer Bumper edition with breakfast when I happened upon a page that almost made me spit out my tasty homemade iced matcha1.

Excuse me? A bag charm? You mean that omamori? That spiritual amulet that signifies good luck in a certain area of your life? The amulet that is sacred to Shintoism and Buddhism, the two main religions in Japan? The one you’re supposed to take back to the shrine or temple at the end of the year so that your good luck doesn’t flip to bad luck?2 Oh shit yeah cool.

Frankie, you disappointed me for the last time with this. Be so fucking for real. The fact that a whole team of people put this photoshoot together, and then a different whole team of people decided it was a good idea to publish it without an ounce of research into omamori is heinous and disgraceful. And I get that they are maybe trying to be funny by parodying people who do unironically say ‘I got it in Japan’ to show how cool they are. But the fact it’s an omamori just goes to show they have the same lack of understanding as the people they are seemingly making fun of. It didn’t relate at all to the content of the shoot, it could have easily been like, a cute little character, if they really wanted to go for the ‘cool Japan’ angle. It could have been the bag itself that this person got in Japan. I could keep going, but the bottom line is, no one thought for a second that this was a problem. Which is deeply concerning to me.

I can’t talk about this issue of using Japanese culture for entertainment value without talking about Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Nobody’s Son’ SNL performance. I love Sabrina, she’s intelligent, she’s hilarious, she’s relatable and she writes some absolute bangers. But she made an impressive error in judgement when she decided to sing her song in a bizarre karate setting, where I guess the punchline was that the whip sounds in the bridge were paired with her breaking wooden boards and kicking people.3 It just. It was simply unfunny. Sorry girl, you flopped on that one, but most of all it was totally thoughtless cultural appropriation. And again, she’s not the only one who made this decision; a whole band, a whole production team of costume and set designers, writers, countless other people, were involved in this. And no one thought maybe a boxing ring might be a better idea4.

But, despite all the criticism of Sabrina Carpenter, including recently where one substacker took issue with the other SNL performance and again raised the whole ‘sexualising girlhood’ argument about Sabrina5, people so easily turn a blind eye to the other much more problematic performance. The only voice I’ve seen speak out about this is Japanese-English singer Rina Sawayama’s. No one else. A Japanese person, was the only one who publicly denounced this performance and rightly said that it was appropriative and in bad taste. Are we serious?

And so what you come to realise is that no one really ‘loves’ Japan all that much. To love something is to understand and respect it. To show it kindness and real interest. But to also embrace the fact that it is not perfect. But no one has enough interest, love or kindness to defend Japanese culture when it’s appropriated in such blatant ways.6

So if it’s not love, it must be lust which is starting to look really creepy. Typically, Weebs are the ones who dominate the creepy about Japan department. They are seen to be in the fringe of society; smelly men with a blow-up waifu, who throw poorly pronounced Japanese into their otherwise English sentences. People who have a myopic views about Japan, thinking it to be a perfect utopia that can do no wrong. Weebs have always been looked at as overly obsessed with Japan and weird. But normal society nowadays aren’t far off those guys. Yeah, globalisation is great, where certain Japanese things are now normalised and not looked at with fascination or disgust, but I think the pendulum has swung too far. Everyone and their dog is obsessed and I’m sick of having to be jump-scared by someone saying something weird about Japan.

I’m not saying Japan is without fault — ever since they gave us Hello Kitty and Pokémon to distract the rest of the world from the atrocities it committed throughout history including colonisation, genocide and a host of other war crimes, they’ve been in on it. And the air of exclusivity Japan gives off (read: monoculturalism that rejects diversity) is what makes people want a piece. But racism is racism, and I’m sick of people feigning interest in my culture just because they like what it produces. Stop using my culture as an identity signifier. Stop using it as part of a bit. I’ve had enough. For the love of god, be normal about Japan.

I give my sister credit for the title of this article - she says it whenever White people are weird about Japan lol. Like when Poppy Lissiman came out with a bag ‘inspired by Japanese school children’. ick

At the end of 2023, I went on exchange to my motherland, Japan, and studied at Chiba University. And by ‘studied’ I mean dicked around with my new found friends and felt like I was back at high school because of the four-period schedule and homeroom like lounge called English House.

Despite often not having class until the afternoon, I would walk to uni from my very cute and small apartment pretty early in the day, sometimes as early as 8:30am (that’s early for me ok). At this time in the morning, I would be accompanied on my walk by a swarm of high school students on their commute to school. As I’m sure many of you would know, Japanese high school girls carry these bags -

And often, they are adorned with approximately 5kg worth of charms. For example -

This is an incredibly tame version. I would see some that were literally covered in these charms. They would have charms for charms, added bag loops for more charms. They had all the new characters, like that weird salmon-head guy.

Japanese high school girls are a cultural icon, to the point that they have their own acronym - JK. Which stands for Joshi Kou(kou)sei 女子高生 which literally means girl high school student. As is typical in a lot of cultures, Japanese youth create and influence pop culture, which is where the bag charm phenomenon comes in. Every person in Japan I swear to god has at least one little charm on their bag. Maybe not salary men but like 90% of people.

And this is not a new thing. every time I have been to Japan there has been bag charms. I would excitedly buy all my favourite character pins and charms, lovingly hanging them on my bags. But then, when I would arrive back in Australia, go back to school, I would feel out of place and childish for having them there. So I would take them off, and put them away somewhere that I could only look at them and feel as if I’d wasted my money because there was no use for them anymore.

Despite knowing this would be the outcome, it happened over and over again - buying a bunch of bag charms (because I have no self control), coming back home, taking them off, storing them away, rinse, repeat.

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My study abroad was no exception. I had a little doraemon, neko bus, random claw machine cherry, Miffy pin, two Kirby regional souvenir charms, all jingling happily on my backpack. Then when I got home, I didn’t take them off, but I did store that bag away.

Fast forward to, I want to say mid last year, bag charms were EVERYWHERE in Melbourne. I have never seen Miffy so much outside of Japan (I know she’s from the Netherlands, but Japan loves Miffy, as do I). Nor had I ever seen or heard about Monchichi outside of Japan, but there the little furry cherub-faced guys were, just hanging on someone’s bag.

I was delighted, finally I could pull out my little bag charms, tie ribbons around my bag straps, indulging in my whimsy, cutesy self, just as god intended. Really, I thought this was the result of Japans’ influence. I have a love-hate relationship with how adored Japan is - I love that Japan in so popular that I can easily access Takoyaki now, but guys you actually need to chill with telling me your trip to Tokyo changed your life in a deeply spiritual way. I digress.

Yes. I thought that this was an influence from Japan, or more broadly some South-East Asian countries’ cute culture fuelled consumerism, but then I slowly started to realise that it was not that, but a much more chic trend coming into the zeitgeist. ‘Birkinifying’ your bag.

I will tell you a little bit about where this comes from.

So the Birkin bag was born in 1984 when the sitting executive chair of Hermes at the time, Jean-Louis Dumas, sat next to actress Jane Birkin on a plane from Paris to London. Birkin had complained about how the handbags at the time were impractical for mothers, as the contents of her bag was literally spilling out all over the place. Inspired by this, Dumas created a bag that was big enough for life’s essentials that was made to be lived in. It also retails for $10,000 to $2 million AUD. Sooo accessible to the everyday mother, am I right?

In addition, it seems that the trend is a sect of ‘trinket culture’, whereby the girlies collect all sorts of random little guys, including Sonny Angels, Sylvanian Family (guilty), those weird little green guys, and most recently, Labubus. It kind of diverges from what a trinket actually is, but I will get into that later.

So this trend, is kind of an ode to Jane Birkin and her personalised, authentic style, where you are supposed to trinketify your bag with items that represent your personality. This Vogue article details it some more. It’s funny because at the start of the article its like ‘find items from your childhood that represent YOU’ and then proceeds to list a bunch of things you should buy in order to do this?

One of the issues I have with this trend is how blatantly consumerist it is, and how it veers away from this supposed authenticity and the act of placing care and emotional value in possessions. This is inherently what a trinket should be, but of course because we have so many new and shiny things at our disposal we will mindlessly buy them and feign interest in our newly acquired possessions in order to be on trend.

All of that about consumerism has been said before, and I think me saying that is a tad late to this conversation. However, what I haven’t seen in all of the conversation about bag charms, is that it is not, in fact, Birkinifying your bag that you are doing, though you might think it is. You are Josei Kouseing it.

It is so painfully obvious that this is what it is. Miffy, Monchichi, Hello Kitty, Sanrio characters in general, Snoopy, Totoro, all of those charms you have right now on your bag? They all came from, or were popularised by Japan and Asian culture. There is nothing chic or Jane Birkin about it. You are making your bag look something akin to a Japanese high schoolers, and yet people seem to ignore that fact, rather, proclaiming they are just like a highly successful British-French actress and member of a prolific British family.

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This is not the first time this has happened, where an aspect of Asian culture has been taken, repackaged and spewed into Western Culture. Take Matcha, for example. At first just a type of tea, that Japanese products occasionally featured, like the infamous matcha KitKat. Labelled as a weird by white people (in my experience), unnaturally green, grass milk, it was really only popular amongst Asian cultures. Now, every bitch is drinking matcha to the point that it has now been labeled a ‘white girl drink’. I like to joke that matcha makes me feel at home with my mixed Japanese and White identity, because Matcha = Japan, Matcha latte = white girl. It’s even gotten to a point where some men are pretending to like matcha lattes to cosplay as a woke guy. Girls are made fun of for drinking them, people are making videos about the performativity of drinking it, along with aaaaaaaall the other things that happen to products that were once enjoyed by a smaller group of people but then became insanely and ridiculously trendy. It has become so popular to the point that farmers are struggling to meet demand and there are whisperings that the tea might go extinct.

The difference is that matcha is named for what is it. People love the Japaneseness of matcha. The ritualistic, mindful way it is brewed, the delicate deep flavour, the process of harvesting. The kind of alternative coolness that so many Japanese things acquire. It’s a very fashionable drink and enjoying it proves just how cultured you are.

But saying you decorate your bag like a French actress will always be cooler than decorating it like a literal 16-year-old. People love to scream Japan until it’s convenient and more stylish to scream something else. It’s funny that no matter how quirky or whimsy people think their bag decoration is, they will never make the connection between joshi kousei’s choices and their own. Which is just so convenient seeing as though bringing up Japan in every other aspect of living is so so easy for people1.

And I get it, the bag charm trend is part of the nostalgia of girlhood2 movement and a push against lifeless minimalism. I totally get that there are people who are like ‘waaait I loved Miffy when I was little and this tiny plushie is so cute I gotta have her on my bag’. I read an article on the topic of Labubus by a certain content creator living in Australia, saying that she has always collected and adorned her bags and her space with characters such as Miffy and Monchichi and Hello Kitty. She pressed the argument that her memories and connection to these characters made her collection legitimate and categorically not consumerist, but because Labubus seemingly popped out of nowhere, they are a problem. Yeah okay influencer with multiple brand deals. Anyway.

Despite this, it just feels insanely typical that white culture yet again has been allowed to police when an aspect of Asian culture gets to be cool. It gets to repackage it, make it new and different, gets to act as if they pioneered it. And you know what’s going to happen? It’s going to be uncool again, eventually. It’s going to be tacky, as someone said it already is in a substack article about ‘chicness’ I read and cringed deeply at. And then once the trend has been thrown out, people will continue to go to Japan and think haha wow, those Japanese high school girls are so behind on the birkinifying their bag trend.

I would like to hedge this by saying that growing up in a town in regional Victoria, I was made to feel categorically unpretty.

Throughout school, comments about my eyes and my skin were made frequently, including a supposed friend pointing out the barely visible blackheads on my nose and blaming them on my ‘weird Asian skin’. I was once told it wouldn’t make sense for me to date anyone other than the only Asian boy in our year level. My hair was like straw, my fingers were too long and skinny, my mouth was too small and my nose was too big (those last two I truly do not understand). So you can probably understand my confusion when, at my casual job, customers started telling me how pretty I am.

These comments made me truly uncomfortable. Not because mine is a dated Hollywood story where the protagonist (me) didn’t know she was beautiful until the proverbial glasses were removed from my face. No, it’s because comments like this are always coupled with probing questions about my ethnicity.

I’ll usually tell the stranger directly that I am half Japanese and half white Australian, to which they’ll nod knowingly or make some boring conversation about how beautiful Japanese culture is.

Other than being creepy, what bothers me most about interactions like these is the lack of boundaries. I think People of Colour (POC) have been discussing for decades how weird it is for strangers to ask about your ethnicity. Quite simply, it’s putting selfish curiosity above another person’s feelings and singling them out as different, treating them like some kind of rare breed of dog.

Always an outsider

Japanese culture has long been one that the West finds alluring. Australia is no exception, with record numbers of Australians visiting Japan in 2024. Our country’s love affair with Japan means that, while bringing Japanese food for lunch doesn’t receive the same ridicule from my peers at university as it did in primary school, I feel like I’m part of a fleeting trend and that someday, maybe, the West will get sick of me.

While the sentiment is different when I’m in Japan, I still don’t feel at home. Naively, last time I went there for a semester of study abroad, I thought I would feel a sense of belonging with Japanese people; that I would be able to blend in and be treated as a Japanese person, walking through the city in blissful anonymity. But alas, I felt even more like an outsider than I did in my regional hometown.

One time, I showed my bus ticket to the driver, which had my name written clearly in Japanese (霜手晶), and he told me my seat in English. I had a girl in my sports class run up to me one day and ask me essentially what my ‘other half’ was (どこのハーフなの？), then never speak to me again. I was buying some mochi during a New Year’s festival at Tokyo Tower and the woman at the stall spoke to me in English. At this point, I was so fed up I responded that I couldn’t understand English. She responded, “Oh, sorry, I just thought because you’re so pretty.” (ごめんね、かわいいから). It was utterly perplexing. There are countless more stories I could tell you about being denied my identity as a Japanese person; over and over again being told that I don’t belong there.

Half-white hafu

People like me are called ‘hafu’ in Japanese – half Japanese and half a non-Japanese ethnicity. It can be a pretty loaded term, where it’s sometimes used derogatively with connotations the person isn’t ‘whole’ or ‘pure’.

Japan, as still a largely monocultural country, has a problem with foreigners and diversity. The beautiful and unique culture that people perceive as Japan’s is wrought with intolerance for difference, and many Japanese people struggle to understand nuance in issues surrounding immigration and cultural identity. This can even be seen on a bureaucratic level, as Japan doesn’t allow dual citizenship (although I’ve found myself a loophole for that one).

I truly do love Japan, and a big part of me feels at home when I return there. There’s a deep-rooted familiarity in the sounds and smells of Japanese suburbia – the crispness of the dry winter after escaping Australia’s sweltering heat, the absolute joy I feel chowing down on my obaachan’s cooking, the cheerful traffic light tone as I traverse the tiny streets. But it’s a hard truth to realise that Japan doesn’t love me back, or even recognise me as one of its own.

One point I must acknowledge is that, while I am (and pass as) a person of colour, I’m also half-white and benefit from that proximity to whiteness. Other Hafu whose other ethnicity is non-white face a different set of challenges to me – one that I will never experience. In a strange way, while white people are treated as foreigners and outsiders, they’re still held on a pedestal in Japan and many other Asian countries. Seen as the epitome of the Western world, they’re talked of fondly and have had great influence on the country’s beauty standards. There’s a ‘correct’ way to be hafu, and most of the time, that is to be half-white.

It seems that in both Japan and Australia, half of me is exotic enough to be interesting, and the other half is familiar enough to be comforting. Living in this paradox of wanting to belong to both, but belonging to neither, is an experience many mixed-race people know well. I just wish it didn’t have to come down to our looks all the damn time.

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Return of the book review !!!!!!

The Brightest Star In the Sky - Marian Keyes (2009)

I picked this up at the library purely because I thought the cover was cute. Marian Keyes work hadn’t really been on my radar before, but this ended up being a really fun and fulfilling read. Delightfully Irish, the novel takes us through the intertwining lives of the residents of 66 Star Street, through the narration by an unnamed omniscient present in the building. Most of the storyline spans over a 60 day countdown with backstories on characters given here and there.

I liked most of the characters, they felt real and had a lot of nuance. In saying that, I HATE Conall. He was so boring and annoying. Fionn was also such a little shit. Honestly, maybe I only really liked the female characters in this book, because I didn’t really like Matt either, though I felt for him.

Despite the 600 odd pages, the ending of the novel felt a little bit rushed — like Keyes realised that she actually had to conclude all of the storylines she randomly started throughout. Much of the book felt rom-commy which I liked, however there was also one particular storyline between three characters that is quite harrowing. If depictions of sexual assault, rape or suicidal ideation trigger you, I suggest not reading this book. In my opinion, I think it does a pretty good job of depicting the aftermath of such events, especially because this book came way before the most prominent period of the #metoo movement in 2017.

Anyway, that’s all for my review. I give this a 7/10