Review: "10 Things That Never Happened" by Alexis Hall

10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall
Published October 2023 via Sourcebooks Casablanca
★★★

Partway through the book, my Spidey-senses tingled, and I checked my impressions of one of Hall's previous books...and yes indeedy! Still convinced that Hall read stacks and stacks of fanfiction as a teenager.

I love the snark and Hall's general irreverence in the writing, and I'll keep reading Hall's contemporary books, but I had a lot of trouble getting behind the characters here. We have Sam(wise), who works very hard to be the Cool Manager rather than one who is concerned with sales/his employees' basic professionalism/how often an employee destroys thousands of pounds of merchandise. We also have Jonathan, who cares very much about the bottom line and is a huge fan of micromanaging, yelling at his mother, and throwing a single Christmas party that employees at the one far-flung branch have to travel four hours on their own dime (pence?) to get to. Cue Jonathan trying to fire Sam, Sam ending up with a concussion, and Jonathan thinking that Sam has total amnesia because of it.

So...Sam ends up staying at Jonathan's swanky house for weeks(!) on end in case he takes a concussive turn for the worse—never mind that the NHS recommends 48 hours of monitoring, or that there's no way on earth that the character who is Jonathan would install an employee he actively dislikes in his house—he would hire somebody to look after Sam in Sam's own space so that Jonathan didn't have to deal with him. (He'd also maybe, like, look up amnesia? Because Sam's 'amnesia' would be much more convincing if he was claiming to forget only, say, the past two weeks and not literally everything about his entire life.) I can live with some unlikelihoods, but the amount of rude that Jonathan is to his mother (and his family more generally) is just...not on. I can't root for a character who treats his (exhausting but very well intentioned) family like that. I can't root for a character who sees all that and thinks "Yup, this is the guy I want to bang!"

Again, I'll keep reading Hall's stuff, but...maybe not any sequels to this particular book.