The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.
 

Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.
 

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.
 

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?
 

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.

With beautiful rose-tinted postcard snapshots of various European locals, an endless array of food porn-worthy food and beverages, and two attractive horny bisexual ex’s (technically leaning more towards pansexual but I digress) stuck on a dream vacation itinerary, Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing has a stellar recipe on paper. And if I were to compare this novel to pastry on display, it certainly looks exquisite and intricately decorated in presentation (please bear with me and let me run with this bit). Unfortunately, once you cut the cake and start tasting it, it quickly becomes evident that there was too much literal (Theo) salt in the batter and maybe the cake was a bit burnt in places. My experience with reading The Pairing was similar to this poor hypothetical and metaphorical pastry in that the elements were good but a few crucial elements made this book difficult to enjoy. My biggest gripe was despite McQuiston pushing really hard to sell this as a past ex’s enemies to second chance loves trope, the enemies arc leaves a lot to be desired and the relationship dynamic between Theo and Kit has a dry and acidic aftertaste. I feel like this story would’ve worked considerably better had it been conceptualized as an ex’s friends to second chance lovers trope and the plot didn’t try to push the hot hookup angle so hard (it never really worked for me personally). While there were some wonderful details and some great backstory ingredients in the mixing bowl, their limited use and ratio resulted in them being barely noticeable in the final taste test to a food/reading critic judge and even less appreciated by a general customer. Despite all the great flavor notes that were incorporated in theory, unfortunately no amount of buttercream frosting and decorative details are enough to compensate for the unpleasant, or to me, underwhelming base dessert (a dessert I fully finished eating I might add unlike majority of the top-listed Goodreads reviews that DNF-ed it, you need to finish it in order to review it properly imo).

(Thank you for rolling with my bit, now on to a proper book review)

A lot of other people have already reviewed and noted how insufferable Theo is and how trying it is to get through their half of the book, so I’m not going to beat a dead horse as I share similar sentiments. However, what I will comment on is the relevance of Theo’s mentality and McQuiston’s good execution of it despite how unbearable it is to read about. Theo’s psyche of “this is my comeback and fierce era” is one that’s completely on-brand with a lot of younger millennials/genZ’s and the mentality of being strong and not needing family and partners are verbatim things I’ve heard from friends. Theo’s arc of trying to impress Kit once they run into each other on the makeup tour booking purposely boasting and showing off is a perfectly crafted example of “winning the breakup” younger people are obsessed with, so really Theo’s entire personality and outlook is technically very well done.

Unfortunately where I feel McQuiston went a bit wrong was with the post-breakup dynamic between Theo and Kit and balancing their two personalities with their character flaws. In order for the enemies to lovers trope to work well, I believe that both parties need to show clear inherent flaws to avoid villainizing one of the characters and to encourage the reader to root for their reconciliation. The issue with The Pairing is Theo’s perspective is first, and their personality comes in hot with a lot of overblown reactions, lots of immature whining, and some questionably toxic tendencies (all very in-character for the current generation I might add). So much effort is spent stressing how terrible Kit is and how much better Theo has become without really explaining what made Kit so horrible to them, quickly causing Theo to lose credit. When Kit finally makes his first appearance at the food and wine tour, he unquestionably makes a far better and mature first impression which only stresses how crazy Theo is by comparison. The book’s enemies arc consistently felt contrived and all of the early conflicts felt obviously manufactured and unbelievable. Despite being portrayed as heartless by Theo, I think most readers still see Kit more favorably in the first half which is a bad sign before the book flips to Kit’s perspective. After experiencing their relationship, breakup, and reunion from Kit’s perspective in the 2nd half of the book, what little flaws Kit had seem even smaller, maybe even justified compared to Theo’s. With his biggest flaws including a self-sacrificial tendency and a super hero complex, Theo looks even worse which sharply contrasts Kit’s blind infatuation and devotion to them. This clear disconnect caused me to feel ambivalent about Kit’s perspective (despite being more pleasant to read) which was only exacerbated by side details about art and some of his interests that ultimately felt like unnecessary fluff to pad out his half. His backstory involving his mother’s marriage and her influence on him were great, but they were incorporated so late just before the resolution, it felt like it was too little too late and tonally out of place with the rest of this book’s content.

Apart from the clear unbalance between Theo and Kit’s characters, I felt like The Pairing didn’t quite pull off whatever it was trying to do. It wasn’t funny enough to be a dramedy, not ambitious enough to be a good character-driven story, not spicy enough to be romance erotica, it was caught in the middle without doing anything particularly well. With questionable chemistry, the main pairing didn’t interest me at all which leaves little else to read about in this book beyond food porn (and unfortunately I am also not really a foodie). The author’s preface note is “For your pleasure” and compared to McQuiston’s past novels, it’s clear that this one is meant to be a more casual, fun novel with a lot of fancy food/wine and sex rather than a big character narrative. Despite its obviously unhinged tone, I found it slow to read and didn’t find its attempt at humor to be very amusing. I can tell McQustion was trying and I think it might work better for more rom-com/dramedy-focused readers, but it didn’t work for me. There’s only so many jokes you can make about classical art and sculptures being inherently horny before it all starts sounding tired and repetitive. The book is also filled with sexual innuendos that I think were supposed to be hot, but I found them to be eye-rollingly try-hard or worse, completely out of place contextually. And until about half-way through the book, there’s surprisingly very little actual spice. In my opinion, the book failed its own premise of trying to hook up with their tour guide or European locals. Both Theo and Kit make barely any attempt on Fabrizio until the very end (and it really just falls into their laps) and their “game” feels like it kicks in far too late to make sense narratively. The only spice present is inevitably and unfortunately between Theo and Kit (any other pairing is handled off-page only), which are good in isolation, but defeat the book’s own selling point. The dramatic breakup also uses the miscommunication trope (as expected) but the disagreement comes off as silly rather than the world-shattering scope both characters make it out to be. The eventual resolution to the problem can be chalked up to character growth and time but the character growth didn’t feel like it was earned; Theo doing a sudden 180 from the Theo > Kit perspective shift and Kit suddenly experiencing enlightenment in one chapter, the aforementioned Mother backstory that is good on paper, but severely underdeveloped.

I don’t feel like I’m knowledgeable enough to judge the portrayals and accuracy of the various European locales and cultures, but McQuiston’s lively and romantic visuals were one of the highlights to me compared to the questionable plot and character choices. Although it’s advertised as a food and wine tour, Theo and Kit’s vacation is just as much a tourist trip and I liked the descriptions of the non-food items possibly more than the culinary experiences. The food, pastries, wine were also one of the stronger elements of the novel, though I do think that the trip was a bit too long and dragged in places. Apart from the different names and tourist highlights, some of the middle destinations started to blend together for me outside of those associated with Kit or the supporting characters. On the plus side, I do feel like McQuiston’s writing has improved considerably from some of their earlier works. I have yet to read Red, White & Royal Blue, but I found The Pairing’s writing style and inner reflections to be critically stronger and more accomplished compared to earlier works that felt a bit juvenile. Each scene and part felt far more cohesive and realized than what I’ve read in the past, it’s just unfortunate that the subjective content makes this improvement less noticeable. I mainly noticed and critiqued it as I was so disinterested in the main story itself and needed something to focus on.

So like the pastry in the fridge display- just kidding, I’m not going back to the bit. So at the end of the day, this one was unfortunately a swing and a miss for me but not for the reason most other readers disliked this book. Theo tried my patience but I was more than willing to give them a free pass because of how committed and technically well done McQuiston wrote their character. But even overlooking Theo’s character voice, The Pairing wasn’t ever able to ever win my interest and I quickly shifted away from enjoyment reading mode to critical reading mode in order to keep going; and even that is not the most flattering light for The Pairing. Despite the great premise and ingredients in the sauce- I mean the batter, I can really only see readers who empathize with Theo actually enjoying this book. The wandering bisexual eyes, food visuals, and tourist stops are decent but are far from being able to carry the book if you don’t care about the, ahem, Pairing. Although the objective qualities of this book are somewhere around a 3-4 star rating, I cannot in good faith rate it that high based on how disinterested I was reading this subjectively. Unfortunately, this means that I’m now 0/2 with McQuiston’s books which is a sign I should probably stop reading them, though I do still have a purchased ebook of Red, White, & Royal Blue which I’ve heard I might like. Oh well, on to the next one to cleanse my palette- (sorry I don’t know what I’m on, this review is kind of a disaster lol)