I want you all to know that the only reason I'm writing this review is because I have nothing better to do. It's not because I want you to understand how I felt about it; it's not that I have anything particularly inspiring or interesting to say. In fact, this quite nicely mirrors the sort of experience this book gave me. 
 Sometimes, when I'm reading a fucking terrible book, I have to stop and wonder: why did no one catch this? I'm sorry to keep banging on and on and on and repeating the same dreck over and over but seriously, why did no one pull the author or the agent or the editor aside in the ladies' room and ask them what the fresh hell they were thinking with this thing? It's bad enough that it's cliche and that the characters are completely tone deaf to everything that's going on around them, even stuff that involves dead teachers and kidnapped brothers and Mara's dead friends, but the writing itself is cack-handed to heights never before seen, so much so that we barely know what's going on, even when the characters struggle to explain it. The plot begins a mystery, and ends a mystery, and it's like the author didn't know what she was actually writing about, but just needed a magical background to make the romance less stale. 
 Newsflash: the romance is stale as fuck. It's like those dodgy rolls you left at the bottom of the bread bin, because it's been a while since you barbecued burgers, and there's only two left, not enough for everyone to have one, and you kept telling yourself you'd figure out something to do with them, but it just never really happened. And then three months later you open up the bag and you think, "Maybe I'll finally use them," but when you turn one over it's the colour of moss. That's not cute. 
 This book thinks it's cute, though. It thinks it's fucking adorable. It thinks that just because a dude is foreign it's okay for him to behave with all of the social grace of an anglerfish, and it's not creepy that our heroine falls in instalove with him, it's just sweet, because this book is a romance, okay? And if we tell you it's a romance then you're not allowed to find it psychotic. And then there's the magical realism which isn't trash, it's ingenious, because we've done vampires and angels and werewolves and this book is just so much more sophisticated than that - so sophisticated, in fact, that we don't even know what it is. 
 What exactly is Mara Dyer's unbecoming? Because this book was the unbecoming of me.