Review: Don't Pick Up Boyfriends from the Trash

Overview

Warnings

Every arc in this novel deals with a 'trash" boyfriend, which often means emotional and physical abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, etc. in the host's backstory.

Review

Strengths

• Extremely satisfying revenge arcs against trash boyfriends who deserve everything that's coming to them
• Excellent and creative world-building, both for the arcs themselves, and for the Systems and how they work.
• A very sweet System/human romance of two people who are very fond of each other and dote on each other a lot.

Flaws

• The second arc was honestly very hard to stomach with a villain who seemed almost too over-the-top. However, this book gets better with each progressive arc, both in terms of character development for the original host/supporting characters and in plot.

This is another book in the Systems genre, where someone dies or has a near-death experience and ends up transmigrated into a different world where they have to fulfill quests with the guidance of a system. More than that, however, it has amazing world-building and a really compelling over-arcing mystery.

The protagonist Chi Xiaochi is clever, snarky, willing to do what it takes to get the job down, but is ultimately a good person at heart. The system is a hard worker who values efficiency, who gets flustered by the Chi Xiaochi's crazy ideas and unorthodox thinking. The system has vowed never to get emotionally attached after he was betrayed by a previous host, but he still finds himself being drawn to Chi Xiaochi.

The premise of the world is that a host is transmigrated into the body of someone who has been wronged by their trash boyfriend. The host then has to accomplish tasks until the regret level of the trash boyfriend reaches 100. With the exception of the second, where the villain felt too cartoonish, all the arcs are *so* satisfying with their revenges. All the supporting characters / hosts have a lot of depth to them. If you love revenge stories, you'll adore this book!

The central pairing: Chi Xiaochi / 061 (System). Both are very sweet and caring towards each other! System watches horror movies with Chi Xiaochi and comforts him! Chi Xiaochi makes dirty jokes that makes System insist "No, I am a very proper system, please stop." Anything more I have to say about this pairing is spoiler territory, but suffice it to say, there are very high emotional stakes for these two and I love love love it.