One admission out of the way: I am not a gamer. I am also not a not-gamer. I like games like some people like The Golden Girls. They're fun and have a limitless short-time obsession factor, but I'm not selling my soul to them, nor am I going to spend a lot of time on them after a month or two. Or money.
So this was a bit out of my range of experience. These aren't even my kinds of games - I'm an uber-lite gameplayer, along the lines of Zelda and Sonic. I've never played an MMORPG (unless DragonFable counts?) and I've always been terrified at the idea of participating in a game like D&D - too much passion and movement, too few guidelines. I like Mario Kart, where you have a designated track which you have to make your way around a set amount of times with what comes down ultimately as the most superior sense of efficiency. It's great. But I digress.
Actually, that's a sign. I'm way more into talking about how Mario Kart is exactly my type of game than I'm into talking about the book I'm supposed to be reviewing. It's not that Guy In Real Life is a bad book, per se. It's just... not a good one, either.
It's the classic story of "a guy and a girl from two very different lifestyles have a meet-cute(-but-awkward-too) and then end up falling in love through various quirky incidents that shift up and down the scale of believability." It's so classic that I was bored. It's a constant set-up of "obstacle - obstacle hurdled" repeated until the book ends, with a bizarre obstacle that was basically every 90s/early 2000s parent's worst chatroom nightmare.
Boy has a weird, not-very-friendly friend who's super into something the way Boy is into Girl? Check. Girl has a cast of cardboard, often pointless friends who don't like Boy? Check. Girl has another suitor who goes toe-to-toe with Boy? Check. It's all so generic. While Svetlana did have something of a unique voice, she came off a lot as obnoxious rather than individualistic, and I don't even know what was going on with Lesh.
I'm bored just talking about it. It's not as much rage-fuel as a John Green book but that just makes it drab to talk about. Two stars, find some other, actually quirky contemporary teen romance.
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