A Show for Two

Product Information

counting down with you', bhuiyan's debut novel, received widespread success if we're talking about the positive buzz and reception it managed to generate on booktok. a love story featuring a bangladesh-muslim girl with her white savior boyfriend, there seems to be ambivelence with which people approach the book. the booktok community have shown their true colours, seeing as they always push for representation and visibility for marginalized voices, but when members of those communities speak up on how harmful that representation was, they seem to turn a blind eye.

A SHOW FOR TWO is a YA contemporary novel and was written as a love letter to new york city. it's inspired by when tom holland went undercover as a student at my high school during my senior year (which is still surreal to think about), even though emmitt and tom are very different from one another. i like to think they'd be friends in this alternate universe, though!

cough* The celebrity romance!!! LIKE???? EXCUSE ME???? YES???? PORFAVOR??? The THINGS I would sacrifice to be able to experience this. Well, maybe not experience- because the drama is an added bother in my existence. But maybe fictionally experience? In a fake yet real way? I’ll shut up now. Of course, as nice as trying to remember a book I read months ago to then write a review of the ARC that literally got published a WHILE ago, while trying to sound as coherent and responsible as possible.

i loved this story so much, i love mina rahman so much, and the romance that blossoms between her & emmitt was very sweet. there's something so genuinely enamoring with the way that tashie bhuyian writes her ya romances and i will read every single one of them for as long as she continues to write, i know that for certain. The hot yet unattainable love interest you will never even be able to glimpse in your pathetic mortal body and soul?) In term of the actual story, I think Bhuiyan has a very Wattpad-esque style to her storytelling. It’s not particularly a bad thing but one that you can’t help but notice as you wade through her writing and rather shallow character-building/plot arcs. I think she also struggles with a tendency to self-insert in ways that are just a little too obvious to even pretend to be subtle: case and point, Emmitt Ramos is first introduced as an actor for Foul Lady Fortune (the novel that her roommate and fellow author, Chloe Gong will be publishing this fall. Funny enough, Emmitt’s mom is named Claire Gong. See, it’s so obvious it’s almost painful lol). Thank you Netgalley for ruining my expectations once again. If a celebrity doesn't call me sweetheart or love- Dang it, I need a life.There was the representation aspect, which, as always, I adore reading about. The struggles of living among people who would maybe not understand the struggles you face, and I felt like that was delved into thoughtfully and quite well. and another rando says "foul lady fortune" is his favourite film, which is gong's next novel. someone save me please.

CSM Graphic Communication Design alumni and art director Kyle Harman-Turner on the potential of football to bring global warming awareness Does Mina like any specific directors? Cinematographers? Composers? Is she excited about any new releases? She apparently likes screenwriting, so who’s her favorite? She doesn’t even step foot in a movie theater until Emmitt **Rents One Out For Her.** Does she care about the politics of the entertainment industry, its history or future accountability? USC's film school serves as this distant green light at the end of the bay, but USC is a 1. primarily for grad students and 2. highly specialized and specific. So what part of the industry is she truly passionate about? my biggest issue with this story is that it literally is a carbon copy of tashie bhuiyan's debut. if you've read that, you've read this. if you've only read this, don't bother to read cdwy because you already have! it's like a shitty two-for-one deal you didn't want. All her film club scenes are bland. Like Mina is supposed to be this aspiring screenwriter but there’s zero film terminology used in the story beyond a wayward movie references. I never got the impression that Mina was a die hard film lover like she was made out to be. The conflicts she had with Rose and Anam were also lukewarm with little stakes. Even the eventual college decision and film contest competition was passed off without any satisfying plot conclusion.one of the things i find most abrasive about authors joining and encroaching on fandom spaces, especially on platforms like tiktok, is that it automatically flips a switch in people's minds and all the negative reception their books receive seems to vanish into thin air. this case is no exception. and if it's not just them, it's mina with emmitt, whose first meeting is absolutely terrible and riddled with so much antagonism and i couldn't help but wonder " how are they possibly going to soften up to each other? and then i just found myself so caught up in the adventures they take around new york city, capturing so many moments together on film, it was like they were in a motion picture with them as the starring leads. seeing the way they lower each other's defenses and genuinely connect over their shared love of the arts and how it connects to their lives, it was very sweet and so incredibly heartfelt because there's so much surprise they find in how much they come to relate to each other. it's as if they couldn't even fathom the idea of the other being an equal of sorts and yet as soon as that line connects them both, they bond so well it made me shriek with how much my heart bursted at the seams (honestly). but, uh. this is genuinely one of the worst things i've read lol. like cdwy was terrible too, but at least that had SOME plot? SOME structure? i really can't fathom how you can take a pretty interesting concept as this and just make it so offensively bland. i'm not even going to comment on the "romance" bc it's truly forgettable. not a single scene between mina and emitt was memorable. i've already forgotten every interaction between them. THE MAN OF THE HOUR! EMMITT, MY MAIN MAN. What a soft boi? I loved him. His thoughtfulness, the attention to Mina's mental wellbeing while also not drawing attention to it and risking her acting out as a defence mechanism (because she would. She was feisty). He was great. When he saw her at a low point and brought her to her favourite place, I almost had a meltdown?

I wish her support group was more aware of her. I know mental health is as silent as you let it be but if her friends and sister knew what was going on... I think the conflict was unfair. Being depressed doesn't give you a right to be terrible to people, don't get me wrong, but I think Anam was the only one who I felt was justified. Rosie just... it felt like a huge overreaction. Maybe I missed something but I definitely think that Mina trying everything in her power to get out of the suffocation of her parents outweighed the crush that Rosie had on Sofie. It doesn’t help that I’m not a big fan of first-person point of view, which is made worse by some really strange sentence construction that Bhuiyan employs (present perfect tense which threw off my sense of time off so subtly it bothered me through the entire novel). I also think perhaps she saw criticism of her previous two protagonists, that they were in general toothless and without any flaws or friction, and then just went wildly swinging in the other direction. Mina and Emmitt are truly abrasive and unpleasant to read about. I didn't feel their relationship develop at all, just a switch flip somewhere around the middle of the novel. Their dialogue, which some call banter but I call excruciating is punctuated with unnatural pet names and "Gen Z" slang which is so hyperspecific to a certain kind of internet subculture, it reads as juvenile, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Wholly heartwarming and enchanting." —Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights and Our Violent EndsA book that you would read solely to stave off boredom and let go of stress, and a story that you shouldn’t look too into it. I guess my experience with this book wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad either. It was really entertaining and it had some good moments :)