Leslie ☆︎'s Reviews > ttyl

It’s been years since I read Dante’s “Inferno,” but I’m confident there is a circle of Hell in which sinners are eternally damned to read Lauren Myracle’s “ttyl” over and over again.

For what sin would this be a fitting punishment? Homicide? Arson? Not replacing the toilet paper roll? That’s up for God to decide. Regardless, I would rather be drowned in the River Styx than read this “book” again.

“ttyl” is about three fifteen-year-old girls whose names I’ve already forgotten even though I finished the book last night, so I had to refer back to it. There’s Zoe, whose only personality trait is that she’s being groomed by her teacher, Maddie, who hates everybody until she doesn’t, and Angela, the dumbest, most selfish, most obnoxious character in all of fiction.

“ttyl” starts with our main trio insisting they’re going to be best friends forever, no matter what, because they’re not like *other* friend groups that drift apart over time — which immediately signals to the reader that they’re going to have a falling out by the end of the story. Lauren Myracle isn’t subtle about her use of irony.

The rest of the book recounts average teen girl drama — so-and-so breaks up with so-and-so, so-and-so’s mom is overbearing, so-and-so is being creeped on by her teacher, etc. Despite our main trio making some of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever read in fiction (e.g. Angela stalks her ex, both in person and online, even though he could not make it clearer that he doesn’t want her), if this book were told like a regular fiction novel, I’d probably have given it a higher rating.

My biggest issue is the format. “ttyl” is told entirely through the text messages (or IMs, or DMs — it doesn’t matter) between three characters. This format fundamentally doesn’t work. The story of the book — the thing that makes a book entertaining — happens off-screen and is only recounted to the reader after the fact. Why should the reader care about an event they themselves weren’t an active observer of?

For example, Zoe spends the entire book bitching about how much she hates a girl named Jana. We the audience have no incentive to care about this because we never *meet* Jana and aren’t given the opportunity to judge her for ourselves. We’re only being *told* what happened instead of being *shown* what happened *as* it happened. We aren’t actually reading a story. We’re being *retold* a story through early-2000s teenspeak that’s so obnoxious it makes me want to rip my teeth out of my head and swallow them one by one. It’s like Myracle prompted ChatGPT to simulate a text conversation between three teenage girls using only Buzzfeed’s entire publication history for reference.

Because this is the most scathing review I’ve left on Goodreads so far, I feel I should include a disclaimer: I’ve never written a fiction novel. Any attempt I make at this point in time would almost certainly be a colossal failure. Additionally, I strongly believe there is no such thing as a bad book, or bad music, or a bad painting, etc., because the result of any creative endeavor is inherently subjective. But, man, did this book challenge my beliefs.

I read “ttyl” because it features on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most contested books in the United States, which my best friend and I are tackling together. Here’s my message to any and all librarians, school directors, and principals: stop removing bad books from your catalogue, because it means someone who wants to stick it to the man (like me) will inevitably read it, and it will ruin their day.