Million Little Mistakes (Do-Over Novel, #2)

by Heather McElhatton

[nannah]

Ew.
Ewww, ew, eww. This has to be one of the most disgusting books I've ever read. I checked all the 1-3 star reviews to see if anyone else addressed the absolute AWFUL racism, ableism, transphobia, etc., but I didn't see anyone do it yet. So I'll do it. For a book written in the last decade, this is so obviously and terribly offensive (and not just to someone like me, who's sensitive to pretty much everything).

Content warnings:
rape
transphobia
ableist r word
racist as HECK
g slur (instead of "Roma")
frames sexism as sexy
fatphobia

Okay, so Million Little Mistakes is a choose-your-own-adventure novel (and actually my first experience with one of these; I never read one as a kid!) where you choose how your story ends. Plus you can reread this book over maybe 40 times at LEAST and have a different story/ending! I took the time to read through every single ending (I figured that was the only way to “read” a book like this all the way through?).

The story is that you, the MC, have just won 22 MILLION dollars from the lottery. Now what? Well, you have what seems like an infinite amount of choices via the end of each of the book’s sections, but not all choices end like you think it would: good choices might not make your story end up happily, and bad choices might not make your story end up badly.

However, where the book largely fails is with its main character and her tone -- and then basically everything else. The MC is like Eleanor Shellstrop from The Good Place times 100. She’s (it’s largely hinted that you’re a woman reading this, lmao) awful in nearly every way, and makes decisions during reading sections that make absolutely no sense. One in particular is that after you, the reader, decide to open a dude ranch, she’ll turn it into a brothel for even the weirdest fetishes (but not lgbt-friendly, lmao! What is a gay, anyway?). Besides things like that, she’s so judgmental, sulky, and always speaking internally and externally with a snark that makes reading this feel like you need to stop or everything around you will feel tainted by it.

She (or the author … ? Hmm.) is EXTREMELY offensive. If the character is challenged on her isms, then fine, it’s a character flaw. But no, ohhh no, this MC was overflowing with nastiness so often and so much that makes me think this is the author letting loose. The worst example: ableism.

I’m not talking about treating another character like crap on the bottom of her $10k heels, I’m talking about the r*t*rd word sprinkled on the pages like candy dished out on Halloween and like similes about people being compared to disabled people in derogatory ways every other section, etc. Check out some of these quotes:

- “You pick up waitressing right away. By just pretending you’re a kindergarten teacher for a bunch of legless r*t*rded kids who ask stupid questions and can’t get anything for themselves.”
- “First you buy your way out of the Lanie mess, by giving each family member a million dollars. Let them spend it on their potato of a daughter if they want to.” (← to be clear, Lanie is in a coma)
- “Sure, the products you push create a generation of mentally unstable, malnourished freaks, but they don’t really affect society for another two decades and you have lots of fun till then.” (← She worked at a company making products that combined medicine like ritalin and depression medication for children and foods so kids would take their meds)

And we mustn't forget about the blatant and shameless fatphobia, either. Some of it almost made me cry; is there ever a reason to be so rude? Unless the character is literally supposed to be this awful for a specific purpose (i.e. a villain, to be challenged later and given good character growth) -- and yet, still, I wouldn’t want this to be so horribly shameless. I can’t imagine the author thinking this type of tone enjoyable. Again, I’m going to show you a couple examples to prove just how awful it really is:

- “Everything is supersized at the Pancake Ranch, especially the people. The overcrowded dining room is packed with ravenous, walrus-sized customers wedged into red vinyl booths, and their similarity with chunky marine animals does not end in size. They waddle around, knock things over, bleating for syrup, belch out loud, and roll their big bellies heavenward after eating enough not just for a person, but for a whole pod.”
- “Self-important adrenaline junkies who hyper-focus on fine print are no better than bratty, obese children who pitch fits when served the wrong pie.”

Sorry for so many examples, but without them, I don’t think I could do a good enough job of explaining the extent this author goes to. It made this book irredeemable for me. The book even tried to be “woke” or something by including stories here or there with black friends or a whole bunch of friends from around the world who saved a gun store from being robbed by a white man -- but when the rest of the book is racist? That isn’t going to save it ….

There’s a woman who screams “Police!”, and the author spells out the dialogue to match a racist, stereotypical “”Asian”” accent. The MC describes her manager as a “king of the pig-tusked walruses, a greedy little reptile-eyed man”, she says snarkily that in Haitian jails “Medical care is most likely provided by a witch doctor”, and at one point her tour gets robbed -- by all things (but also ..of course) by a band of Roma people pretending to put on a show for them; and they’re called by their racial slur. There’s another robbery/attack in the book, this time by some Somalian boys attacking a cruise ship going around Africa, and they also (of course) have a bunch of automatic weapons. Not to mention, the MC has a bunch of babies from a bunch of different countries, and this is her comment about it: “You don’t care about what scientists say about nature versus nurture or learned behavior versus blood memory -- if you let the Cuban baby and the Haitian baby anywhere near each other … there will be blood.” It’s hilarious (/s) for a white woman to make a comment about this -- and only this -- regarding her babies, many of whom are white, and have a laugh about it.

There’s more, so much more, but mostly I’m listing these here so you can decide whether or not you want to even open this book. It’s FULL of all of what’s listed above. There were also very few stories I found genuinely enjoyable. The MC’s voice and the strange plotlines made it hard for me to like these adventures. If they didn’t go towards strange sex things (like baby fetishes or sex servants and even -- the worst! A man rehabilitation center to torture men into becoming the man you truly want) it went to real estate → and then strange sex fetishes).

Besides all this, the writing was weak with grammar mistakes, and it kind of made it a point to reward you for picking bad choices and laugh at you for attempting to be good. So ...

… Not for me. Definitely going to pass on just about everything Heather McElhatton writes in the future.