I regret spending my money on this book. I thought, I hoped, I would find Bookworm to be funny as this book is described as “comic noir”. But there is nothing comic about this book, and the bookworm protagonist is insufferable. As a bookworm, I find this book to be insulting. I finished this book because I do not like to leave a book unfinished, but I feel sorry for the trees that died to make the paper this book was printed on.

Bookworm is about thirty-eight year old Victoria, an unambitious massage therapist who works at spa, who has controlling parents who are both lawyers, and is married to a controlling man who is also a lawyer. Victoria is not happy with her marriage, which I cannot blame her for, because her husband, Eric, is cold and anal retentive. But even I have to agree with Eric that Victoria has an unhealthy obsession with reading. When she agrees to go along with Eric’s demand that she takes a two-week break from reading, she acts like a petulant child when he puts on a movie on for them to watch and refuses to stare at the TV screen. Like, what the eff is wrong with watching a movie?

One day, while reading a book that is heavily implied to be Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (and showing how much she lacks empathy by bashing it) at her favourite café, Victoria notices a handsome man also reading A Little Life and all of a sudden she thinks he is her soulmate and starts fantasizing about killing her husband so that she can be with this stranger, who she assumes must be a bookworm like her just because they are reading the same book. O-kay.

Now Eric is not the best husband, but as much as a douchebag as he is, he does not deserve to die. Victoria should divorce his ass, but for some reason she won’t. It isn’t even explained very well why she went along with marrying him in the first place. The only way a “comic noir” about a woman fantasizing, and then actually trying, to kill her husband is going to work is if the woman in question is:

1. A sympathetic character, which Victoria is not despite her bullying relatives. She is not a meek, submissive woman cowed by the other characters, who ineptly tries to outsmart her abusive spouse. She has a lot of internalized anger and is calculating; or
2. A charming, entertaining character who you want to see if she can actually pull off a murder, like Joe Goldberg from You (who I have to forcibly remind myself is a stalker and murderer and to not feel sorry for him). But Victoria is not charming. She is smug, and snobby, and willfully obtuse about certain things.

So what is the point of Bookworm? Is it supposed to be satire? If it is satire, then the implication is that bookworms disdain everything that is not books, live constantly in their dream world, and fantasize about killing people. I can assure you that as a bookworm, I do not live in a dream world, I do not fantasize about my husband’s death, and I do have other hobbies besides reading. Victoria is a psychopath who happens to like books. Being a bookworm does not make her a psychopath.