149/111 - Lolito by Ben Brooks

I bought this recently as an impulse because I read and loved Grow Up by the same author, and I had had no idea that he had another book coming out! So I bought it and started reading it the next day.

The story is about a British teenager called Etgar who is sort of lonely and isolated and be discovers that his girlfriend Alice has been unfaithful to him. He starts using online chat rooms and he gets to talking to an older woman named Macy, and they start a sort of online romance. The rest of the book covers Etgar getting drunk and high in various ways, and generally being very heartbroken over Alice and nervous about the prospect of meeting Macy.

I quite liked this overall, but I'm not sure I liked it as much as Grow Up. I felt it was a bit more difficult to get close to and like Etgar, although I definitely felt sorry for him, sure. Part of it was that there were a lot of references to certain areas of pop culture, like TV shows and films and YouTube that I didn't really connect with - not that I didn't understand what they were, just that they didn't really speak to anything for me in a particular way.

I lent my copy of Grow Up to my youngest brother recently, and as coincidence goes, he texted me to ask if I had anything similar the day after I bought Lolito, which is a happy coincidence, so I told him that I would be able to lend him this once I was finished with it.