- Genre: Literary Fiction
- Published by: Random House Publishing Group – Random House | The Dial Press
- Publish date: May 27 2025
- Number of pages: 320 pages
- Author’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicoladinan/?hl=en
- Support local! Preorder the book on BookShop!
After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan
“Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.”
Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.
Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy.
Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.
Rating: 4/5
I was locked into this book from start to finish. Nicola Dinan does an incredible job of inviting you into a slice of life of two people as they start dating. As their worlds open up to each other and they meet each other’s friends and family, we see how their backgrounds impact their relationship. Don’t go into this book thinking you’ll either love or hate certain characters, instead think of them as incredibly human– still capable of fucking up, still having to confront their mistakes, and still able to love and be loved.
Told in dual timelines and points-of-views, we follow Max as she’s going through a pivotal change in her life and she starts dating Vincent. We also have Vincent in the past on a trip he took to Thailand when he was a young adult and a relationship that changed many aspects of his life.
This book covers difficult topics but also offers nuggets of comedic relief with Max and Vincent’s friends and family. Full of conflict and forgiveness, this novel left me pondering how much we are willing to forgive the ones we love for their past mistakes, and more so, do we even have the right to offer that forgiveness?
Have you read this book? What are your thoughts? I’d love to know!
I received an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book from Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group – Random House | The Dial Press. This has not impacted my rating and this review is voluntary.
Musings by Michelle 