An exercise in weaponized stupidity.
I made it about halfway through Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, which is saying something, because I will usually finish a book out of sheer spite. This one broke me.
The problem isn’t that the book is light or silly. I love light and silly when it’s done well. The problem is that Olivia herself is painfully empty-headed, and the story built around her is an exercise in willful idiocy. There’s a difference between a quirky protagonist and a character who drifts from one bad decision to the next without learning, growing, or facing a single consequence. Olivia is firmly the latter.
To be fair, there was one bright spot. Around pages 79–80, Olivia lists her “Rules of Living,” and for a brief moment I thought, Oh! Here we go. It was clever. Self-aware. Almost charming. And then the book immediately abandoned that energy and went right back to flailing around like a dying fish.
I couldn’t find a plot. Or a storyline. Or even a clear point. It’s just an airhead making bad decisions and somehow expecting the universe to clap for her efforts. Whoo hoo. Consequences apparently did not RSVP.
Worse, the book leans hard into casual misogyny played for laughs, with racism that shows up uninvited and refuses to leave. These moments aren’t sharp or satirical; they’re careless. Outdated stereotypes do most of the heavy lifting, and the humor consistently punches down while expecting the reader to be in on the joke.
In my humble opinion, this book is little more than an airhead making increasingly awful decisions in a world where consequences, plot, and self-awareness simply do not exist. This wasn’t charmingly silly. It was empty, careless, and weirdly proud of it.
