Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?
Nicola Dinan presents a much-needed update on finding love in London as a 30-something ... Dinan’s great talent is her witty and meticulous observation. Max’s first meeting with Vincent is a masterclass in the minutiae of date anxiety: will he judge me for holding my chopsticks badly, or not sticking to plant-based only in Veganuary? ...
Max’s scrutiny may be knife-sharp but it also cuts. No pretension nor peccadillo is left unpicked as she surveys the actions of her friends ... This insightful novel suggests that, sometimes, getting off your high horse and extending a hand to that person is more useful and more human.
Highly readable and engrossing ... Dinan is adept at capturing the apathy and cynicism engrained in dating via 'the apps', where the paradox of choice gives rise to a second-guessing diffidence and a shirking of real intimacy ... Her prickliness and understandable sensitivity make her a contradictory and complicated protagonist; both dissociative and painfully attuned to those around her, drolly sarcastic yet striving for sincerity and transcendence through writing ... Her voice is acerbic, often hovering between irony and outright melancholy. Her zingers are cutting and camp ... Disappoint Me is an ingenious title, setting the reader up for the question of when and how the seemingly wholesome and evolved Vincent will be revealed as a less than ideal partner ... Through its contrasting timelines, the novel poses the question of whether those views have merely been obscured by virtue-signalling niceties; camouflaged under modern etiquette ... The inarticulacy and passive aggressiveness that can clog longstanding male friendships is especially well drawn ... Much more than just a love story, Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow of power and secrecy with astuteness and compassion, cementing Dinan as one of the UK’s most perceptive young novelists with her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary behaviour.
[Dinan] trained as a lawyer before turning to writing and you can feel the precision of that training in the exactitude of her language, which adds to the pleasure of this book. There are lots of acidly observed one-liners, too, that made me guffaw ... Dinan is also excellent on the often anti-erotic experience of modern dating ... After the laughs subside, the reader is left with a heavy understanding of just how difficult life for young millennials and Gen Zs can be ... This is a strikingly contemporary novel, with details like 'she/they mullets' and drug references you have to google. It also offers much-needed insight into what it is to be trans. Dinan’s ability to present genuinely thought-provoking riffs on gender, race and identity without becoming didactic is truly impressive. But, as with Bellies, Disappoint Me is first and foremost a love story about complex and real characters with whom you become deeply involved. It absolutely does not disappoint.
