30 Going On 13
Overall Enjoyment: ⭐⭐.5
Plot: ⭐⭐.5
Characters: ⭐⭐
Writing: ⭐⭐⭐
Spice: 🌶️🌶️
Synopsis:
Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick is about a woman facing her thirties. Phoebe Berman has always been a hopeless romantic; however, that clashes with her insurmountable fear of intimacy. Now that she is about to turn thirty, she wants to go into this next phase of her life having completed the one thing she wanted to achieve: losing her virginity.
Review:
Averick takes her readers on a journey of self-discovery. Phoebe works through her anxiety of physical intimacy in a way that feels very much like a romantic comedy. In the beginning of the novel, she comes across as irritatingly immature. While it is always appreciated seeing therapy session representation, they begin to feel more like a ritualistic practice because Phoebe does not take her therapy seriously. Her fixation on achieving a goal that is influenced by societal expectations feels disappointing; however, when framed by her determination to overcome her personal phobia, the premise gains a little more substance, but not enough to carry the entire novel.
Phoebe is the type of character who, in other stories, tends to become the quirky side character meant for comic relief rather than the protagonist. Seeing her take the lead creates a conflicting reading experience. While there are moments when rooting for her feels like the most natural thing, there are others when wanting to yell at her feels equally natural. It is refreshing to have a lead that doesn’t have everything figured out, but Phoebe is far too self-consuming. Her flaws feel less like a complex character and more like a caricature of a woman obsessed with losing her virginity.
The storyline attempts to be compelling, drawing readers into Phoebe’s struggles. However, once you arrive, you realize it’s a story of a woman obsessed with her own issues who repeatedly makes them her friends’ issues as well. She rarely gives her friends and family the same attention she expects them to devote to her and her problems. A reader can only follow a character so far before realizing she is self-sabotaging. Throughout the novel, Phoebe spends more time looking for a man who can help her check this goal off her list than she does searching for a genuine connection. She even goes so far as to fantasize about a random hit-and-run encounter in which a stranger offers to sleep with her, further demonstrating how much the accomplishment itself has overshadowed any desire for an emotional connection.
There are other instances where details feel slightly off and pull the reader out of the story. At one point, Phoebe mentions that the fathers who drop off or pick up the kindergarten students are usually between their forties and sixties. Along with several other moments throughout the novel, details like this keep the storyline from becoming fully immersive.
Overall, for a simple rom-com, Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It is satisfying enough. Having mental health representation, specifically intimacy anxiety, GAD, and OCD, is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, even as the therapy sessions demonstrate how difficult it is for Phoebe to listen to her therapist and apply the tools she is given. What initially feels like another romance novel becomes Averick’s attempt to portray a woman who has difficulty getting out of her own head and, in turn, reflect some of ourselves back to us. Unfortunately, Phoebe’s characterization becomes so consumed by her fixation on losing her virginity that some of the nuance the novel attempts to create gets lost along the way.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Stay tuned for my next one! – Jules Grant, Associate Editor & Literary Critic