Julia ౨ৎ ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ♡ is 40% done with Deep End: THE AUDIOOO SLAPS!!!! I'm literally sweating!!!!

⋆˚࿔ avery˚✩٠࣪ is on page 120 of 276 of The Summer I Turned Pretty: Taylor Swift + book = best combo ever!!
âœÉôŸ˜­ðÁ¶—

"₊⊹♡ 3 stars ⋆˙⟡
spoiler review below ౨ৎ ↓ ⊹₊ ⋆

⊹ ࣪ ˖ do i have to smash a glass over the head of every single man i come into contact with, just so i can leave a fucking mark?

thoughts �
⟡ i am so conflicted on my feelings abt this book. it was basically one big trigger warning, and it was a little traumatizing to say the least. overall i just felt so icky while reading it, but in truth : i could not put it down. something about this book was so addicting in a horrifying way, and every second i wasn't reading it i was thinking about it. the synopsis does not give this book justice whatsoever. "boy parts" follows our main character, irina, whose a photographer that specializes in explicit art, where she photographs men she finds out on the streets. she starts to spiral down a dark path of drugs and self-destruction, where her art slowly starts morphing into explotation as she becomes more & more unhinged. watching her start to take things a step farther everytime with the guys she's with, whether it's choking them or threatening their lives, it started reminding me of american psycho, and it was so sickening.

⟡ one thing i loved about this book was it's focus on gender roles in society. irina photographs these men off the streets in degrading ways, and it's quite the opposite of what the media usually portrays.
seeing a female perform these acts on men is unsettling and dark when the roles are flipped, and it really shows people how disturbing it can be when it happens to women in real life. it also shows the power indifferences, when one person in the situtation (in this case, irina) has more power over the more vulnerable subjects (and in this case, the models), and i really enjoyed that aspect of the book.

characters �

⟡ irina
despite how much she bothered me, i really liked her character for some reason. something about her was really interesting to read about and being in her mind was a wild expierence. she is so narcissistic, and she thinks everything is about herself. she lacks any sort of empathy for anyone (including her best friend, among others) , and she doesn't care how her choices will impact the people around her. but she was also very beautiful in a hyper-feminine crazy way, and i liked the aesthetic the author gave her : she was all blood-red nailpolish, leather skirts, smeared red lipstick, and heavy eyeliner. (if she wasn't a terrible person, she would definitely be the it girl). also, i thought it was interesting how, no matter how badly she treated people, they always came back to her. something about her is so magnetic, and she had this dark pull on all the characters that made them not want to leave, which was so frustrating to read.

⟡ flo
for some reason, i didn't really enjoy flo's character. this is irina's obsessive best friend, whose strangely in love with her. she has a secret blog where she spills all of her best friend's secrets and such, and I just thought she was so weird. i did pity her a lot though, and the stuff that irina put her through made me so upset for her. i just wanted to scream at her, like BABE STAND UPPP. irina was literally ruining her life and she just kept allowing it over and over. it was so frustrating 3.

⟡ the men
anddd honorable mention to the disgusting men in this book! obviously i don't agree with the stuff irina did (to an extent, some of them deserved the mistreatment), but there were men in this book that were TERRIBLE. on multiple occasions, there were mentions of her being raped and it was so so horrible to read about. i never want to put myself through those chapters again. so even though i know she was a evil person, whenever she would fight back against these bad men, i was secretly rooting for her.

and i think that's honestly the most conflicting part of this book. it makes me wonder.. am i a bad person for supporting her when she would fight back? obviously, she's not a saint herself. but if a man assaulted her, and she would punch back, or if she got raped and almost killed the man as he was leaving, is it wrong to be proud of her? after all, wasn't she both a victim AND a perpentrator? i would love to sit down with the author and ask her these questions to figure out her intent behind some of these scenes.

final opinions �
this was an interesting read, and i liked the genre of this one a lot. i would love to reread this and annotate it in the future because there were some really good quotes in here! i'd reccomend this to anyone looking for a quick and unsettling read, but pls look up tws first <3

started ➤ may 5, 2025
finished ➤ may 6, 2025"