I received a complimentary copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about a young woman meeting, taking home, and developing feelings for a blob she found on the ground outside a gay club. But the premise was too intriguing to not check it out. I’m happy to say I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed this story.

Vi is twenty-three and doesn’t fit anywhere. Her dad is Taiwanese, her mom is white, and she’s always felt stuck between two worlds in her Midwestern college town. She dropped out of school. She got dumped. And now she works the front desk at a hotel where her main responsibilities require her to deal with people and she’s not much of a people person. And then there’s her perky, white, cutesy co-worker Rachel who is trying way too hard to be Vi’s friend.

One night, Vi finally agrees to go to a drag show with Rachel to watch a mutual friend perform. After the show, she finds a blob in the alley next to a trash can. It has beady black eyes and looks absolutely pathetic. In a moment of drunk impulse, she picks it up and takes it home.

And then things get weird.

The blob becomes sentient. It responds to her. It obeys her commands. And Vi, who is so completely over her dating life and tired of disappointing relationships, realizes she has an opportunity. She can mold this blob into the perfect partner. So she starts feeding it sugary cereal and a steady stream of pop culture. And slowly, the blob transforms into a conventionally attractive white man.

At first, it seems perfect. She’s created exactly what she wanted. Someone who listens. Someone who adores her. Someone who won’t leave or disappoint her. But here’s the thing. When you’ve molded the perfect partner without doing any work on yourself to fix the real issue, happiness doesn’t just appear. And Vi has a lot of unresolved stuff she needs to deal with.

This book probably wouldn’t have worked as well as it did had Vi not been an absolute snarky hot mess. I loved her attitude. She’s so over everyone it’s almost comical. She’s cynical, guarded, and has zero patience for small talk or performative friendliness. But underneath that gruff exterior, she’s surprisingly insecure. She’s dealing with loneliness, rejection, and the weight of never quite fitting in anywhere. She was very nuanced, and I connected with her immediately.

The book has a lot to say. It’s about control and the illusion that you can shape someone into exactly what you need. It’s about loneliness and what happens when you try to fix external problems without addressing the internal ones. It’s also about racial marginalization and what it’s like to grow up feeling like you don’t fully belong to either side of your identity. Vi’s experiences with her ex-boyfriend, her family, and the world around her all feed into why she thinks creating the perfect boyfriend is the solution.

But the book doesn’t let her off easy. As the blob becomes more human, Vi is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex who unfriended her, and the ways she’s been hurt and dismissed her entire life. The journey she goes on is messy and uncomfortable, but it’s also necessary. She learns that it’s impossible to control the people you love. And that trying to do so only makes you more isolated.
The book is quirky, funny, and often touching. There are moments that made me laugh out loud. Moments that made me cringe because they hit too close to home. And moments that genuinely moved me. It’s a quick read, but it packs a lot into its pages.

If you’re drawn to weird, quirky stories with emotional depth, this is absolutely for you. Maggie Su has written something really special here. It’s absurd on the surface, but it’s deeply human underneath. The premise could have easily been a gimmick, but Su uses it to explore real emotional truths about desire, belonging, and self-acceptance, and she does it all with humor and heart.