Review: 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers

888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers by Abraham Chang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Okay I’ll be honest, that triple dose of Don Henley needle drops on the first official page set my expectations a little too high, but that’s even after seeing the low GR rating tempering them. I do love the film nerd and music nerd of it all, don’t get me wrong. Hell, the amusing dreams of conversations with big name directors from America and China alike, these scenes alone would be great little short stories. This book could’ve just as easily fallen into John Green pretension, but despite hitting his same combo platter of favorite tropes, it manages to be a hell of a lot more endearing. But that’s a low bar to clear.

The flashbacks to Young’s childhood and adolescent loves (and on the subject of Young, how the hell did I not know his name meant “ocean?” Bloody cool, dude), they’re unusual in that they’re rendered in second person POV. Normally that’s a negative for me, but given that Young is an anxious OCD dude, it does a great job capturing his dissociative experiences. (I’m not OCD, but I’m definitely anxious and depressed enough to dissociate a hell of a lot.)

Unfortunately, for me, what makes this book a 3 instead of a 4 is 100% Erena. She’s such an obnoxious manic pixie dream girl, immature and charmless and trying to play it off like a defense mechanism when frankly she doesn’t have much to need to defend herself against. I fail to see why Young is so hung up on her - he really deserves better, and yet he’s so bound and determined to break the alleged “seven loves” rule with her that it boggles the mind.

Then again, I’m still at a point in my life where I have yet to learn the lesson that love is patient and kind, to paraphrase the book’s very end. I still think it’s a curse, especially for someone like me, neurodivergent and therefore assumed to not deserve love in life.

I just hope there’s no Erena in my life to disabuse me of my depressive notions, because if there is, she might just kill me.

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