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The Breakup Tour
By Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka
🎧 Narrated by: Dan Bittner & Brittany Pressley 
Book 14 of 2024

Thank you to Berkley Romance and PRHAudio for my review copies! 

I don’t normally post negative reviews online, so if you don’t want to read a negative review, I completely understand and send you on your way to scroll! I have been talking a lot about DNFing lately, and when I do that I often don’t write a review, I feel like it’s a little unfair since I didn’t finish the book and maybe it got better? But I am making an exception to my rule because I am personally offended that this book was the way that it was and I need to vent about it. I read it cover to cover because I wanted it to be better than it was and I just couldn’t let go of my hope that it would somehow, magically turn itself around. (It did not.)

This book was marketed as being based on Taylor Swift, and is dedicated to Swifties and Ms. Swift, so that was clearly the intention from the authors. HOWEVER, this book follows a pop star named Riley who is best known for writing breakup songs. And if you did not tell me it was Taylor Swift fanfiction, that would be fine. But if you’re making it sound like you’re BASING your book on Taylor, don’t use the infantilizing, sexist stereotype that was created by the worst parts of the media when Taylor was basically a teenager. It’s gross. It would not be gross if this was written like the Barbie movie. Or the song “The Man” where it confronted those stereotypes. But that is not what the authors did. No, they in fact had Riley’s character arc be that she doesn’t feel like she can do real relationships or is deserving of love because breakup songs is all she is good for in this world. 

And honestly, I probably could have forgiven this like I did the weird consent issues in some of my last reads of 2023. I can compartmentalize my beliefs for the sake of a good story. Feel free to judge me for that. BUT these two had no chemistry. Maybe when they sang together? But they were both so whiny the entire book and so not romantic at any moment that I truly did not care if they got together. I think the characters with the most personality were the bus driver and the ex boyfriend who called Riley “Nightmare Girl.”

Even more petty complaints:

Sometimes, they would refer to her performances as a “rock show” – pick a lane. It’s either pop or it’s rock or it’s pop-rock, I don’t feel like those labels are interchangeable. Maybe I’m being overly picky or I’m wrong, but it bothered me. 

This is not a rom com. It’s melancholy and written as though Chat GPT got ahold of the lyrics of Evermore and a contemporary romance and did it’s best to write a romance with Evermore descriptions. Maybe these descriptions work for some people, but I thought I was doing a cartoon cover romcom, so they felt pretentious. Or maybe the poetry they were attempting was just really badly done. You can be the judge of that. 

Now, I have heard that some non-Taylor Swift fans did enjoy this book, so I think a lot of the issues are around characterizing this as Taylor Swift fanfiction. But even if it wasn’t, the book’s writing style would not have been for me.