A Thousand Perfect Notes

I read the last few pages of this book sobbing into my book. This book made me feel so many emotions all at once. Anger, happiness, sadness, all jumbled up into one book. I knew I was going to enjoy the book, but I LOVED it. Beck is a smol bean and I would protect him with my life (as I would August tbh, ngl). But what I enjoyed the most was the writing. Each sentence fit so well with the story, with the characters, and it made the story flow so nicely. And as a German native speaker, I was delighted to see all the references, and usage of German in this book (also if it is very heavy on the swear words, but we DO have great swear words lol). This book is a pure delight (also if it will rip your heart out and eat it). Plus: I can totally get behind the cake enthusiasm in this book; 10/10 would eat August's vegan cakes.

I really have to write this down immediately and just let it all go, or I'm just gonna get in a slump. This book has a beautiful cover. I marked like 5 quotes that I enjoyed a bit. And sadly this is where I have to get into why I couldn't give this book more than 2 stars. Let's start with my biggest problem. I couldn't get over this, no matter how hard I tried. I'm German. I speak German and my English is very good. I'm not bilingual but I think I know something about the German language and it's grammar. First of all I hated it how the MAESTRO was this German cliché of the angry tall lady. Like seriously. I can't see that anymore, it's annoying and weird. Other than that, why did they throw in random words. I'd have preferred if the book had just made it obvious that they speak German with each other and then continued with English. The random German words annoyed me, this is not what happens when you speak another language. There was no connection to actual German grammar and sentence structure in there, just random words. Those words were used correctly, that's true. I just feel like this was research only half-done and for me that was unacceptable. This is a very personal opinion, I know, but I can't get out of my skin. Now my second biggest issue. The whole story was obvious. There was no surprise there, I mean the main conflict is stated on the back of the book and there is no depth to the characters. Good old Beck (his real name made me scream, seriously it's a last name. No one would do that. Take his first name. Don't people know the first name. This was so annoying.) was just self-pity and that's it. I heard I would cry my eyes out over this struggles but mine were drier than ever. I couldn't connect at all. His mother was such a cliched villain and the use of German just irked me every single time. No one says Schwachkopf. That's the weakest insult ever. And then there's August. Good old manic pixie dream girl August saving him from his horrible existence with her smile and sunshine and whatever. She had so many wannabe edgy traits, I couldn't take her seriously from the first page she was on. This might seem ranty and I'm sorry about that, but I was just very disappointed, bored and actually angry at some parts. I could only get through this, because I skim read the last like 100 pages. I would usually read a book this short in 1 to 2 days, but I've bee fighting with this for for 5 days now and I just couldn't take it any longer. It was skim or DNF and I don't like giving up on books, especially the they are this hyped. But well, just shows that no book is for everyone and I think negative reviews are important as well, I wanna know about these kinds of issues before I go into a book. So yeah. I'm sorry about the rant. This had to be said and I'm done.

3.5