hellooo

casey’s substack from this week about the pairing has planted worms in my brain & i ended up writing a 2000 word post about it. partly about the contents of their post & partly about being nonbinary & seeing yourself in fiction. and how the reviewer is clearly cis lol.

anyway, if you missed casey’s post it’s here

and here is a link to mine if you want to give it a read

Where is my great queer romance story?

Alex and Henry buddy reading 🥹

Okay?? Slay

I know I’m gonna love Kit

The Pairing, Casey McQuiston

i am going to be SO annoying about this

theo-and-kit 💐🍷

Letters from Theo and Kit!! Can’t wait for The Pairing 😭

FROM ME TO YOU, HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

No Ordinary Friend

It started when they were two idiot fifteen-year-old boys talking about sex like it was something other than a foreign concept for either of them, vowing that if they had a threesome they’d do it together and not really acknowledging what that might mean. It started when they were thirteen, when Calum pulled him out of the surf and, in his delirium from the blood loss, his best mate had looked like an angel with the sun behind his golden hair. It started when they were ten and got in a scrap over the right to be called Calum in their class instead of some other nickname, then promptly decided that actually they’d both be Calum and let everyone else sort it out.

(Or, the Calums' story, from Monaco to Palermo)

NOTE: This is a fic for The Pairing, Casey McQuiston's fourth novel, which comes out in August. I got an ARC so was lucky to read it early, and wrote this for @kiwiana-writes for their voiceteam challenges. Be warned, there are spoilers within!

Read it on AO3 (M, 3.5k, missing scenes, friends to lovers)

🍇🧄🍷🫕🥩🧅🍄🫑

IS IT AUGUST 2024 YET

🍆🍑

they are my babies, and i love them already

Finished The Pairing last night and trying to formulate coherent thoughts about it. Overall, I loved it a whole bunch. Of CMQ's books, I've only read RWRB, so I have no basis for comparison against the others, but I am pretty sure, based on synopsis alone, that this one would still be my second fave behind RWRB.

Would love to hear from anyone else who got the ARC!

Some spoilery thoughts beneath the cut for anyone who's interested...

I already suffer from insatiable wanderlust and this book just pinged it over and over again to the point that literally all I wanna do now is travel and eat.

Regarding the latter, if I could actually gain weight from reading, I would have from this book. I have never been so hungry just from reading about food, despite having read many books by actual chefs about their cooking.

I enjoyed Theo's POV more than Kit's, primarily because Theo is funnier and that almost always gets me. Kit is also funny, but in a much more quiet way. I don't think I've ever highlighted so many lines in a book and probably 90% of them are things I cackled at from Theo's POV. I would screenshot them and post them all here, but it's gonna be more fun for people to discover them in context.

I have no idea why it happened, but the image of Will Gao as Kit popped into my head while reading and that is now all I can see.

I love Fabrizio a lot and would like to go live with him in Naples. Orla is also the best.

The ending was fairly predictable. I would pretty much always assume CMQ is going to go with a happy ending, so that part was kind of a given for me, but there's a real specific giveaway at one of the travel destinations that is made even more specific not too long after and you just kind of know where it's going. I wouldn't deduct any stars for it, because I did very much like the ending and it's also life goals, but it's very neat and unsurprising.

I need to go back to Barcelona immediately.

Half way through The Pairing (feeling incredibly lucky I got an ARC) & let me tell you 2 things:

1. You WILL need snacks when reading this book cause the food descriptions are pornographic.

2. CMQ has managed to write the sexiest sex scene ever where no one has sex. Sweet jesus, I need a cold shower.