Published by Wednesday Books on 16 Jul 2019
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In this hilarious follow-up novel to the New York Times bestseller I Hate Everyone But You, long distance best friends Ava and Gen have finally made it to the same time zone (although they’re still over a thousand miles apart).
Through their hilarious, sometimes emotional, but always relatable conversations, Ava and Gen are each other’s support systems through internships, relationship troubles, questionable roommates, undercover reporting, and whether or not it’s a good idea to take in a feral cat. Please Send Help perfectly captures the voice of young adults looking to find their place in the world and how no matter how desperate things seem, you always have your best friend to tell it like it is and pick you back up.
I didn't read I Hate Everyone But You but hoped I'd be able to follow along anyway. The series follows Ava and Gen via correspondences over text and email. In the first book, they help each other survive the first semester of college, and in this second book, they help each other survive life post-grad. As someone who has no idea what's been going on in her life since graduation, I was especially interested in the second novel and dived straight into it instead of starting with the first book.
At first, I was entertained by the office drama and other updates Ava and Gen shared with each other, but after awhile, I couldn't help but feel that there was something disingenuous about the banter between these supposed best friends. Maybe this is where reading the first book would have come into play--to help me get a better sense of these characters--but that's not something I'm planning on going back to do.
The main reason for their banter feeling disingenuous to me was that there were so many explanatory asides throughout their correspondence, which cheapened their relationship to me. The explanatory asides felt like a crude attempt at giving Ava and Gen distinctive personalities. Gen's only personality was being gay; it was as if she just discovered her sexuality and couldn't stop talking about how she was gay. All the 2019 references you could think of were thrown in, and they cracked jokes that I would have missed if not for, again, the explanatory asides.
I suppose this is the challenge that comes with writing in epistolary format (or this kind of modern epistolary format). There's not much context to draw from, so these explanations must be made.
