Review: BILLY AND ME by Giovanna Fletcher

FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: Billy and Me
Author: Giovanna Fletcher
Publisher: Penguin
Price: £7.99 

Pages: 432
Genre: Love Story
Year: 2013

BACK OF THE BOOK / WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

Sophie May has a secret.

One that she's successfully kept for years. It's meant that she's had to give up her dreams of going to university and travelling the world to stay in her little village, living with her mum and working in the local teashop.

But then Sophie unexpectedly meets the gorgeous Billy Buskin - a famous actor with ambitions to make it to the top. As they begin to grow closer, Sophie finds herself whisked away from the comfort of her life into Billy's glamorous - but ruthless - world.

Their relationship throws Sophie right into the spotlight after years of shying away from attention. Can she handle the constant scrutiny that comes with being with Billy? How much is she prepared to give up along the way? And is their love strong enough to keep them together against the odds?

And most of all, is she ready for her secret heartbreak to be discovered and shared with the nation?

MY THOUGHTS ON IT

I bought this book three years ago at the airport in Malta because a Booktuber that doesn't even do Youtube anymore recommended it in a video and I was also really into the cover of the book.

But the book got neglected by me because I expected it to be a sweet, rather ordinary, straight love story and I was less and less into those kinds of books. 

Then I read "It Only Happens In The Movies" by Holly Bourne (click here for my review) and was so into that straight love story that I thought that now's the perfect time to read this book. 

Unfortunately, "Billy and Me" did many of the things wrong that "It Only Happens In The Movies" did right. 

But let's start at the beginning.

The book starts with a flashback, written in a hard-to-read cursive font, that got me quite intrigued into the story because Sophie, the main character, seemed relatable and likable. She is into books and mostly classic English literature, which got me more interested in finally reading these novels myself. I also instantly felt cozy and comfortable in the lovely atmosphere of the Tea-on-the-Hill tea shop where Sophie works. The detail with which the coziness of the shop and the warmth between Sophie and the owner of the shop, Molly, got described, was just heart-warming and everything was set for a perfect comfort-read.

Then the book introduced a film set and thereby movies into the stories and Sophie had several moments of intensive fangirling over Jude Law, and I was hooked.

I've always had a thing for Jude Law myself and can never watch The Holiday without swooning over him, but ever since he has been cast as the young Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts and has been promoting this movie together with that cast I'm just completely into him and he's my man crush #1 at the moment. So it felt almost spooky that I seemed to have waited so long to read this book only to read it at the perfect time, at the height of my Jude-Law-obsession..

And Jude Law kept showing up again and again throughout the book and every time that happened, the book gained a plus from me. 

So although I could highly relate to Sophie's love for literature and her obsession with Jude Law, I still had huge problems with her low self-esteem and non-existent sense of self-worth. Those "shy girl" traits are probably meant to make her more likable, more relatable for the reader, but they did the exact opposite for me.

And that's where it gets tricky for me. Because on the one hand I think that I might have enjoyed the book more when I was younger because I would have been able to relate more to Sophie and her shyness and self-insecure self. But on the other hand I don't even want to say that I'm to blame for not reading it when I was younger because I don't want to encourage those female characters with so little sense of self-worth and no self-confidence at all. I'm not sure how old Sophie is supposed to be in this book but probably around 25 years old, so older than me, and she just acted in a way that is expected from 16-year-old protagonists, which I found very sad. And the story does give the reader reasons for Sophie being like that through the flashbacks (which are always written in that quite-hard-to-read font) and emphasise that she had actually been quite different before that certain thing had happened. I just wish that the book would have made Sophie develop throughout the story into a more self-confident and self-loving person, because her lack of ever going in that direction made me lose my connection to her throughout the book. And that is always the point when a book goes downhill for me, once I cannot relate to or find I do not like the main character anymore.

The book is titled "Billy and Me" (which already says all about who has the dominance in that relationship by the way.. - often I just wanted to scream at Sophie that it should be her first and Billy second and not always Billy first and then her... but we'll come to that later), so obviously there is a love story happening between Sophie and this Billy guy.

At first, Billy seemed like a sweet guy (although his throwing-the-head-back-laugh really irritated me) and I had nothing against him, although I did never feel any chemistry or sexual tension between him and Sophie. (And as I've just written in my last review, that is the most important thing for me to decide whether I am into a romance or not.)

With a book of over 400 pages, I found the love story to happen far too quickly when there's already talk of marriage after not even 100 pages. I really wondered what the rest of the book was then going to be about..

Well, it turned out that the other 300 pages where spent in making this relationship so toxic that I wanted to shake Sophie and tell her to get the hell out of it for her own sake.

There are so many problematic clichés of straight relationships and gender roles incorporated into this book that are not even pointed out to be unhealthy, which made me really furious.

Just to name a few of them: 

Billy not wanting Sophie to work because he can provide for them both shows very patriarchal characteristics that I felt very uncomfortable with. Especially since Sophie explicitly says that she wants to work to keep her independence, which doesn't seem to hold any meaning for Billy whatsoever.

Sophie leaving behind her whole life, loved ones and job just to be with Billy because Billy wants to live with her although she would only be one hour away if she had stayed in her village. Sophie therefore ending up completely unhappy, isolated, with her sole purpose in life being baking fancy things for Billy to come home to and appreciate.

Billy coming home drunk with friends although Sophie needed to sleep to get up early the next morning. Billy utterly disregarding her concerns and making Sophie and her job feel unimportant.

Billy making Sophie uncomfortable by getting very intimate with his female friends. Sophie not being able to voice her issues with that because she doesn't want to come across as the jealous girlfriend. There's clearly no healthy bond of trust between Billy and Sophie. They don't talk about the things that bother them.

Sophie keeps putting herself down and keeps finding excuses for Billy's patronizing behaviour in herself because of her lack of self-worth and self-love and self-confidence.

Since the title of this book is "Billy and Me" I had little hope that this story would end in the only way that could have saved this book for me: the both of them realising that they do not have a healthy relationship and ending it for the sake of both of them.

The only positive aspect of the middle part of the book was the detailed view into an actor's life, which Billy provided. Since the author was herself an actor I found that insight to be quite interesting. 

Luckily, however, the last part of the book was better than that dreadful middle because Billy got swept more and more into the background and Sophie and her story got more into the front, which I liked. 

There was also a very sad plot twist towards the end of this book that made me far more emotional than I had ever expected this book to be able to make me feel. I will talk a bit more about that after my rating, in the spoiler section.

CONCLUSION

Well, I had my ups and downs with this book but overall the downs unfortunately prevailed. The most positive part of the book for me was clearly the constant mentioning and appearances of Jude Law throughout this book. That definitely added a whole star to my rating of the book that would otherwise not be there.

Besides that, I also really loved the cozy atmosphere of the tea shop and the village that Sophie lived in. I would have honestly liked the whole book better if Billy had never shown up in it and it had just been a lovely read about this village and its tea shop. The relationship that Sophie had with Molly, the shop owner, was really touching and beautiful and definitely one of my favourite things in the book.

Unfortunately, I was very quickly annoyed by the male love interest, Billy, because he seemed to embody every cliché of male toxic behaviour in relationships. Billy and Sophie had a relationship that I pitied both of them for and wished that the book had ended with them realising that, too.

The book followed the exact romance stereotypes/tropes that "It Only Happens In The Movies" (click here for my review) criticised and that are just way too old and way too overused.

RATING

I award this book with 3 out of 5 stars.

SPOILER

SECTION

I just want to talk a bit about the tragic plot twist in the movie that is Molly's death, which really hit me hard. It got me so emotional and sad and made me realise that I had formed a deeper connection to Molly than I had thought. Sophie and Molly's relationship was so pure and lovely and Molly was my favourite character of the whole book, so that really hurt. But it also added to the emotional depth of the book which I found positive. 

After having been told Sophie's secret through the flashbacks I must say that that secret of hers gets hyped way too much. On the back of the book it says in a bigger font "Sophie May has a secret" which raises the expectations of the reader and her secret really doesn't live up to that. The whole village has always known of it and it's rather a question of not talking about it with Billy for a while. So I thought that the promoting of that secret rather failed.

Billy and Sophie had that classic reunion through a romantic gesture of Billy but I was just left at the end of the book with so many questions because although they were now together again they hadn't worked through any of their problems and there was just no way that their relationship would suddenly turn out in a different way than it did before. Especially the fact that Sophie now owned a shop and was therefore quite bound to that village and that Billy still had to travel for his acting career just seemed to be swept under the carpet for a romantic happy ending. That just didn't work for me at all.

There is a sequel to this book but I'm really not interested in it because it's just going to make me get furious over them again.