Wow!

Honestly Nicola Dinan might be THE new author of observational litfic and is fast becoming one of my fave new authors on the scene.

Brutally sharp and honest, Dinan shows the turbulent inner emotions of forgiveness, love, and self acceptance in a relatively short piece of work.

However, I didn’t feel as connected to this as I did when I read Bellies.

I found it hard to understand Max and why she was so mean and narcissistic at times. Her hatred and, let’s be honest, chip on her shoulder didn’t seem as important as it was made out. Because we also had big time jumps in her and Vincent’s relationship I thought we skipped over a lot of character study and relationship development. I felt as a reader I missed out on key moments with them together so I ultimately wasn’t as invested in their story as I was with Vincent’s in Thailand.

Vincent’s journey, and path to forgiveness, was what had me hooked throughout.

Disappoint Me defies definition. It's a story about identity and love and friendship. It's a story about shame, regret and forgiveness.

Max takes a fall in a club and waking up in hospital she starts to question where she wants her life to go. She gets no sense of fulfilment from her job and as she sees her friends begin to marry and settle down she wonders if she too wants that life.

When she meets Vincent, she feels safe and cared for. But being a trans woman always makes her feel other, and she searches for signs that Vincent will ultimately disappoint her.

The dual timeline takes us back to 2012 when Vincent travelled to Thailand and met Alex. A woman he was attracted to and liked a lot. But when it's revealed Alex is a trans woman, he questions his feelings and cares too much about what other people will think.

As secrets all too often leave a shadow, so too does Vincent's. When Max finds out about his past it makes her question everything. Can people change? Can she forgive? As she battles her own health issues she takes time away from the relationship to consider what she wants.

With so much fear and ignorance in the world, Disappoint Me feels like an important story. We all feel confusion and shame at times. We all question where we fit in, but for some, the layers of complexity make it hard to just be. To ever feel enough, to feel accepted just as we are. Human emotions are universal and what the world needs is a lot more education and compassion. Stories like these are a counterweight to the ignorant and cruel who see anyone different as less than. It shouldn't matter who we love or how we identify. And yet, now more than ever, it seems to. When we know better, we need to do better.

Nuance is missing from conversations around gender, and this book brings that crucial nuance. I hope with fantastic writing like this, we can challenge rhetoric that wants to separate and isolate us from one another.

Love Nicola Dinan’s writing and adored Bellies, so I had high hopes for Disappoint Me that weren’t all met. Dinan is wonderful at writing nuanced characters with thoughts and behaviours and choices feel grounded in their realities (for better or for worse), and for the most part I loved Max. Even when I didn’t, I still felt strongly for her, which is great character work on Dinan’s part. Sadly didn’t feel as connected to Vincent despite the empathy and care with which he was written. Not to compare too much with Bellies, but there was a clear distinction between Ming and Tom’s voices that just isn’t as apparent with Max and Vincent, which made the latter’s POV fall somewhat flat for me.

There’s lots to explore here; the low grade panic that sets in when you hit 30 and suddenly everyone around you is married or starting to settle into domesticity, questions of identity and how to perform it accordingly, being granted access to traditional spheres of heteronormativity and whether being granted that access is something to strive for at all. Some of the conversations around these themes are pretty on the nose and repetitive at times, but mostly well written.

At its core, this is a book about forgiveness and what it means to give it, both to yourself and to others. Max tries her best to do both throughout the narrative, but I particularly loved reading her ruminations on forgiving the people in her life. Still thinking about the conversation between Max and her father, and will probably keep thinking about it for a while.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I wanted to love this one so much but it just fell slightly flat for me. That said, Nicola Dinan has woven some incredible complex characters and I appreciated how much nuance she brought to each.

My first Nicola Dinan book, and it didn’t disappoint me! Droll and devastating, we explore the undulating relationship of Max and Vincent, two people who find each other in the melee of millennial angst. 30-something published poet, and legal counsel bot Max, meets corporate-by-day-hobby-baker-by-night Vincent via an online dating app, after Max realises she needs to make changes in her life. Together they tentatively embark on a relationship but Vincent has a trad friendship group, and a complicated family situation, where dating a trans woman challenges his traditional Chinese family values.

In the end “people are what they are, and sometimes they’re just an ongoing series of small disappointments” but when something resurfaces from Vincent’s past during a devastating time in Max’s life, can this disappointment be considered small? Dinan asks how we reconcile mistakes from our past, and do these mistakes diminish our worth in the present?

This is a character-driven story of modern relationships, identity, and ultimately forgiveness. Told from the dual POVs of Max and Vincent, with a shifting timeline from the present day and Thailand 2012. Nicola Dinan writes with authority and authenticity, with prose that has its own agency. This book is a dream for annotating, and this fangirl is in urgent need of an emotional tourniquet.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for sending me an advance copy in exchange for my honest review. Honestly this is brilliant - 5 stars!

This was INCREDIBLE! It's only January, but I'm predicting this is going to be one of my favourite books of the year

Disappoint Me is a beautifully nuanced tale about identity and relationships. The book centres around Max - a poet and lawyer who is trying to navigate this dual identity of being a writer while also impersonating an AI in her work as a lawyer, as well as being a trans woman in today's world and relationship scene - and Vincent, a corporate lawyer and Max's boyfriend. The book is told in a dual timeline and pov, with Max's pov in the present and Vincent's about ten years prior, during his gap year in Thailand.

I loved this book! Nicola Dinan writes with such depth, and this story offers an incredibly nuanced view of humans as flawed but real individuals. It explores our limits as to what we can forgive and how much/if we can change.

Thank you so much to Doubleday UK for the proof and also to NetGalley for the e-ARC!

Thank you Random House UK, Transworld Publishers + Doubleday for the NetGalley ARC of Disappoint Me. I enjoyed the story and the split timelines, and I preferred this to Bellies.

I can’t begin this review without saying how absolutely excited I was to read Nicola Dinan’s second book after absolutely loving her debut Bellies. Of course I was curious if it will live up to the expectations and if maybe I have changed as a reader, maybe there was some special magic in the debut novel. Well, there was absolutely no reason to worry, Disappoint Me is incredible and has everything I loved about Bellies and more. Dinan’s writing is captivating in a very special way in which it feels very modern, the voices are very authentic, characters just jump out of the pages but it’s also beautiful and poignant where it counts. Particularly dialogues feel very natural, exactly how people talk and interact with all the nuances of real people speaking. What I found to be a really nice surprise was how much humour there is in Disappoint Me. It is so snappy, observant and spot on, both in dialogue and character’s internal monologue. All of that despite the subject matter getting quite difficult half way through but being handled so gracefully. There are many references to other books, some of them cracking me up like some people’s sudden “wokeness” after reading Detransition, Baby. I love it when books are aware of culture and references like that. There is so much more to praise about Nikola Dinan’s novels and I have a feeling her work will go down in history of literature as some of the best portrayals of trans lives around 2020s.

Thank you to Random House UK and NetGalley for the eARC!

In February 2024, a bookstagram friend recommended Bellies to me. I ended up absolutely devouring it in one evening. Later in the year, I passed on the Bellies love to another friend and joined her for a re-read. Bellies quickly became one of my all-time favourite books. Flash forward to the end of summer 2024: I’m now long-distance besties with the aforementioned bookstagram friend, and Disappoint Me appears on NetGalley. I pressed that request button possibly faster than I ever have, and, excitingly, my friend managed to get her hands on a copy too. Flash forward again to December 2024, a month before the release date, and I’m being read to from Disappoint Me by the same bookstagram friend, except now she’s my girlfriend, and we’re reading together in the same place. All that to say, I had high expectations for this book, and it saddens me so much to say that I felt incredibly let down…

Disappoint Me follows a trans woman, Max, and her cis boyfriend, Vincent, as their relationship develops and they confront their respective pasts and futures. As readers, we follow both Max and Vincent’s perspectives, alternating between 2023 London and 2012 Thailand.

As we saw when reading Bellies, Nicola is astoundingly skilled at writing real, messy, and relatable characters that you truly can’t help but become invested in and fall a little in love with. The characters in Bellies hold such an incredibly special place in my heart, but sadly, I can’t say the same for all the characters in this book. I greatly appreciated the found-family aspects and the overarching characterisation, but my goodness, we spent far too much time and energy inside Vincent’s cis male brain. Much of the time spent with Vincent was incredibly uncomfortable (not in a good way) and often rife with transphobia. This was not only hard to read but also detracted from the focus on Max. I would have loved to have heard more from Max (and Alex, who is introduced later). I almost DNF’d this book purely because of how much I couldn’t stand Vincent’s perspective.

The inclusion of certain transphobic comments (usually within Vincent’s perspective) often felt misplaced and did little to support the overall story arc, not to mention how triggering they may be for some readers. I found myself craving the balance and nuance we saw in Bellies. I also need to mention that I was incredibly disappointed by the Harry Potter reference made in passing in an entirely uncritical way.

I want to end by acknowledging that I still love Nicola Dinan’s writing style and her ability to so seamlessly turn incredibly real and powerful experiences into fictional accounts so vivid that you forget you’re reading fiction. I will definitely continue to read everything Nicola writes and although Disappoint Me wasn't for me, I will forever hold Bellies close.

I’ll conclude by saying that if you loved Bellies and have been excited to read more from Nicola Dinan, then by all means, go for it! Many other reviewers seem to love it. Just be sure to keep the transphobia content warning in mind.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the e-ARC. All opinions are my own.

TWs/CWs:
Uncritical Harry Potter reference made in passing in the e-arc.
Graphic: Hate crime, Transphobia, Violence, and Outing
Moderate: Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Toxic friendship
Minor: Deadnaming and Gaslighting

This is a modern romance with a main character that happens to be trans. And it’s bloomin lovely! Max is our main character and she is warm and bright and funny and the perfect friend. All of the characters are so well written and made me feel really emotionally invested in their stories. Whether you want a trans romance or simply a romance involving two human beings, this is a great choice.

I did really enjoy Bellies by Nicola Dinan but this follow-up book is just as incredible, if not more so! I liked how the characters were in their early 30s and contemplating what comes next with relationships, health and the future whilst trying to reconcile with their past.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

I really loved this author's debut, Bellies, when I read it a couple years ago so I was very excited to get my hands on this, her follow up book. And I am happy to say that I loved it just as much!
Max is a 30 year old published poet. But her life isn't really going anywhere much. A fall down some stairs at a New Year's Eve party has her reflecting on her life in order that she can possibly follow it up with some serious hard choices.
And then she meets Vincent, a corporate lawyer and part time baker. But he has his own baggage, as well as people close to him who might possibly not really understand his dating a trans woman.
So... as we follow Max and Vincent and their relationship in the present, we also go back in time and follow Vincent as he travels during his gap year.
I'm not going to say anything else about the story as I want you to discover everything at the right time and that means, as the author intended. Suffice to say, as with Bellies, it had me in all the feels. I laughed with them, I cried with them, I cringed at them, and I also did a fair bit of shouting at them. Not that it did me (or them) any good!
As with Bellies, it is rather characters driven and, as such, needs to have characters that are strong enough to carry the story. Again, as with Bellies, it most definitely has. Every one, no matter how big or small a part to play, is carefully crafted and perfectly formed to do the job tasked of them. I was well easily able to find a way to connect to each and every one which is especially important as we really all do come from different worlds, and have very little in common.
You might also think that with the main story being around a trans woman and her man, it would be a bit of a repeat of Bellies, well, although it tackles similar issues it's really not. But you don't need me to convince you. If you loved Bellies, you will probably love this. And if you haven't already read Bellies, where have you been?
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

There are no character in this book that aren't perfection.
It's tender and warm. It's heartbreaking but healing.
I felt like I was floating on some sort of.clpud throughout the pages of this book.
I was so in love with our main character and felt all her vulnerability.
I was.amazed she could pick herself up. Not only with the knocks she had but also with just how they made her feel about herself. And I wanted to hug her. Or shout at everyone around her too!
When an accident causes her to bolt to action I was frightened for her. No no just be calm and let people who deserve you come. But act she did. And had she finally found her acceptance from another?
But this man has baggage. A big old suitcase that will or could wipe our Max out.
I applaud this author so much. Her writing is so smooth. So glowing and flowing and flawless. If this is how good she is at such a place in her career than we should all look forward to what's next. There was a real sense of care towards all details big and small. Towards all characters big and small. And everything and everyone to do with the book seemed cared for by the author.
Brilliant.

Nicola Dinan’s second novel is anything but a disappointment!
After loving Dinan’s beautifully tender debut Bellies, I was so keen to get my hands on Disappoint Me. Following a slightly older set of characters (both narrators are in their early 30s), Disappoint Me tackles the isolation and self-doubt that comes when your friends’ paths begin to splinter as each person settles into their adult life.
It took me a few chapters to get used to being in Max’s head – she’s more abrasive than the protagonists in Bellies, and more sure of herself than our other narrative voice (her love interest, Vincent, at 19). But after a few chapters, I was completely sold on her. One of the aspects of humanity that Dinan’s is brilliant at capturing is the ups and downs of vulnerability – the terror of letting your guard down, the sublime reward of someone seeing and accepting you as you are – and this is something we see Max and Vincent struggle with in both timelines. Without giving away a spoiler, we sense right away that Vincent is struggling to disclose his full history to Max in the present; and we see so many instances of Max being invalidated even by people who profess to care about her. Arguably, a fascinating thing that Dinan captures in both characters is that vulnerability isn’t only frightening when it comes to being vulnerable with others, but also with yourself. Max and Vincent struggle to face themselves in so many ways, from their most shameful flaws to their most precious ambitions, and it is this that humanises them so effectively to me.
Dinan’s writing at the sentence level is, as with Bellies, wonderful. She is realistic without being overly bogged down in the details, and in a few strokes of her pen, captures the various settings the characters find themselves in, from Thailand to rural France. Characters speak to each other with verve and wit, but they sound true to themselves and to their real-life counterparts, the mass of adults trying to make it work in London while feeling perpetually behind their peers. The nuances of friendship, and specifically the fallout of when friends fail to live up to the people we believe and hope they are, are also captured so thoughtfully here – in fact, I wish Dinan had expanded on this more. Both Max and Vincent’s friends act in problematic ways, and arguably you could make whole novels out of the blemishes on their characters. I’d read them, anyway.
I did conclude that I slightly prefer Bellies, mainly due to structure. While this was really hard to put down once it got going, it takes a while to establish the direction of the story and really settle into the characters (particularly Max, as I mention earlier in this review). A lot happens very quickly, and a large cast is introduced from the very start. Because of this, the first fifth didn’t land for me as much as the rest, but the payoff is absolutely worth it.
If you’re a fan of Dinan’s, you’re right to be anticipating this one. And if you weren’t fully sold on Bellies, I think this is different enough that you could give it a go and be very pleasantly surprised indeed!

Told through dual perspectives, Disappoint Me, is a poignant novel that explores the idea of coming to terms with the mistakes that those you love most make and the complexities of choosing to forgive them.

Max is a 30-year-old transwoman who while recovering from a break-up, working as a lawyer for a tech firm where she doesn’t even get to sign off emails with her own name, and an unfortunate incident at a New Year’s Eve party decides it’s time to change her life and “get serious” about building the sort of life she thinks she should be living at her age. Enter Vincent, a corporate lawyer of Chinese heritage that she meets on a dating app, who seems to be an answered prayer for Max, but whose past contains a life-changing event that casts a shadow over their future together.

I thought every single character (down to the side characters that make a one-off appearance) in this book was so well-developed. Dinan writes with such depth, and it’s all told through the main characters’ voices which are filled with humour and vulnerability. I enjoyed both perspectives equally which is a rarity for me when reading dual POV books.
The large themes of the book – identity, forgiveness, complex modern relationships, and the weight of past mistakes are heavy, yet the author managed to balance them and create a narrative that was engrossing and hard to put down.

This is a character-driven novel done INCREDIBLY well and I will be forcing everyone around me to read this.

Thank you to the team at Transworld Publishers and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC.

So it was always unlikely that Nicola Dinan's sophomore novel would top her debut, Bellies, for me, and at least part of that is because the skill, intelligence and freshness of her writing is inevitably less surprising second time around. But Disappoint Me is still absolutely worth reading, and I yomped through it in a few days. Max is a British-Chinese trans woman, Vincent a British-Chinese straight man. He's not the kind of guy she's dated before, with his corporate job and worryingly heteronormative circle of friends, but could their relationship work? Disappoint Me skips forward about ten years from Bellies, considering the compromises made by people in their early thirties rather than the uncertainties of people in their early twenties. It feels appropriate that it's both colder and wittier, and Max gets all the best lines ('If this is trans rights, I will do some trans wrongs'.) I missed the more expansive, complex cast of Bellies, but Vincent is a fascinatingly difficult character, as is Max's best friend, lesbian Simone, who has her own troubled relationship with gender that's brought to a head when she's forced to wear a bridesmaid's dress for a friend's wedding: 'It's not like I'm trans... I almost feel if I was trans I could justify not wearing that dress.' Thematically, Dinan continues to avoid simplistic takes on identity politics, and indeed attacks some kinds of social media activism as she considers how far we can and should forgive others, both for the things they have done in the past and the mistakes they make now.

Do we ever really know someone?

The book is told from two perspectives: Max and Vincent. The two of them meet at the start of the novel and strike up a relationship. Max’s story follows her as she navigates the new relationship, feeling uncertain about the direction of her life. Vincent’s story is from about ten years ago when he went to Thailand on his gap year, when things don't go as planned.

I enjoyed this novel, a solid examination of millenial angst and hetronormative relationships. Dinan tells a story with pithy humour, it always feels very current.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC.

Disappoint Me is about how those closest to you can let you down in a myriad of disturbing ways while still loving and caring for you, and how the main character Max ultimately chooses forgiveness.

I appreciated the natural sounding dialogue, though none of it was spectacular. I did laugh a few times. Life is messy and "good" people are capable of committing terrible mistakes, though I'm unconvinced some of the characters had really changed enough.

Max ruminates on the same few topics, which could get irritating, but it's also realistic. Several times I noticed the book reminded me of something else, only for that to be directly referenced on the next page - it's no secret Detransition, Baby and After Life were influences.

I enjoyed Disappoint Me but I'm not sure how memorable it'll be, or if I would recommend it to everyone.

This was a beautifully written novel about relationships, family dynamics, friendships and the complexities of letting go of the past in service of a better future.

Max is a 30 year old trans woman / poet, living in London working a job she hates at a tech company. Vincent is a corporate lawyer who loves to bake and meets Max at a vulnerable time in her life when she’s recovering from a breakup, recently fell down the stairs whilst sober at a New Year’s Eve party, and is having somewhat of an existential crisis.

The story unravels in dual timelines, flitting between Max in contemporary London, and a 19 year old Vincent on a gap year in Thailand with his best friend Fred over 10 years ago…

However, over the course of the book we learn not everything is as rosy as it seems, and Max is faced with some difficult decisions to make.

Disappoint Me was tender, reflective, satirical and completely engrossing! I never wanted the perspective to change, yet when it did I found myself absorbed by the next chapter.

The characters were beautifully rendered and I loved Max’s friendship with childhood bestie Simone. The author writes about the different relationships (romantic, familial, friendships) so perceptively, there was a real emotional tug.

With such a character driven novel the MC’s voice is central to the reader’s enjoyment, and Dinan nailed it with Max (and Vincent). There is so much depth and complexity within all of the characters and the themes of the book are heavy without weighing it down (a true skill from Dinan). There is also a hilarious and devastating scene involving multiple characters, space cakes and the south of France, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself! 😆

I highly recommend picking this up if you are looking for a book that is insightful, funny and compassionate and explores identity, the complexities of modern relationships and forgiveness.

Thanks to the publisher, author and net galley for the e-arc!

Disappoint Me did not disappoint, but it did overwhelm me. There was a lot going on, some of which seemed superfluous and detracted from the plot.

In terms of character writing, Vincent's thoughts and feelings were better explained which therefore made it difficult to understand Max at times because her history was more closed off to the reader. There were some explanations for her attitude towards her family, for example, but personally I didn't feel there was enough about her history as an adult to make me understand her that well. This also made Vincent's character development much easier to follow whereas it was unclear whether or not Max evolved much throughout the novel.

The prose flowed well and the writer's intentions for the novel felt clear throughout. I didn't feel the novel needed the additional drama in Max's storyline but it didn't ruin it for me.