Emily Wibberley

This is one of those books that should be getting ridiculous, viral TikTok-level-hype. To the point, The Roughest Draft is a perfect draft—a 5-star read (which for me means there’s nothing I’d change about it). It’s about jealousy, ambition, insecurity, and estranged writing partners with a past involving an enigmatic inciting incident—former friends who have to hole up in a Florida house to finish a cowritten book.

The story spans their forced book-writing time, which is less writing retreat and more writing war zone. Like Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in War of the Roses: the hot Floridian house is the combative battlefield; the dining room with the single laptop, the war room; the tacit words fly from fingertips onto the screen like grenades being launched. In the beginning, it’s a mostly silent war with the constant rat-tat-tat of the keyboard and some occasional direct hits, landing with audible digs. These two—while alienated for four years—know how to target the other, finding their intimate knowledge of one another wasn’t obliterated like the ending of their friendship.

Reading this book was a perfect push-pull balance. It begins with an inquiry. Instantly intrigued, I wanted to know what happened between them while still enjoying all the potential landmines from Kat and Nathan’s forced proximity. I loved all the layers of the plot and characters and the meta-writing where the boundaries between fact and fiction feel blurry at best. I’m a sucker for books about books or writers or stories, and this one is certainly a book that captures the beauty and vulnerability and intimacy and importance of writing: “Fiction comes from truth. It is a wonderful, imaginative, flourishing thing grown from a seed of real feelings, real desires, real fears. No artist ever creates from nothing. We work from what we’ve experienced, inspired by the unique piece of the world we see. It’s why art cannot be replicated” (244-245).… (mehr)

This book is hurt by all the marketing comparing it to Taylor Swift. Yes the FMC writes breakup songs and yes she is very famous, but that's pretty much the extent of the comparisons? And even those are only surface level.

That being said this book is fine. A lot of suspension of disbelief that this could actually happen based on the FMC's level of fame and the ending is something right out of a JLo romcom... super unbelievable, but overall it was okay.

There are some interesting insights where the author tries to explain why the MFC does things/writes songs so closely and obviously based on her life where you can see she's trying to get into T.Swift's head.… (mehr)

I was torn between 2.5 and 3 stars. I didn't really enjoy this book but there were parts I did get a little into and wanted to see what happened. Honestly, if this was not a Once Upon a Book Club book, I probably would have DNF'd it. I didn't like any of the characters. I think it dragged on their whole history but not really explaining what happened between them. It was completely unsatisfying by the time they did get together, because I honestly could've cared less if they did. I would've been fine if the characters just jumped off a bridge. They made Chris so totally unlikeable that it made Katherine seem like a complete fuckwit for staying with him. I did like how the book they were writing together went along with the story line, the parallels there were kind of fun. Maybe that's the only thing going for it. Now that I've written out this review, I'm definitely going with a 2.5 star rating here. And the whole story with Heidi, the friend. Like she was so mad at her and they didn't talk for four years because she said she loved Nathan back then? I don't know. They made it seem like she had killed her dog or something. Katherine was just overly dramatic. Anyway, I clearly didn't really love this book, so moving on!… (mehr)