The protagonist of The Adversary by Australian writer Ronnie Scott is a young man who is an introvert, afraid of sex and in love with his best gay friend.

This was not a real success to me. Scott can certainly write well but he uses sentence structures that had me often read a sentence over before I understood what he was saying. Next to that the text is interspersed with all kinds of words, probably Australian slang, that I had to look up. So reading wasn’t that comfortable to me.

That in itself wouldn’t have kept me from liking the book, but on top of that I could not relate to the millennials that are the only characters here. Their behavior towards each other and the conversations (better: single sentences expressed, because real conversations are hardly there) between them made me think: really? Is this how people talk? I just failed to see it for real.

It felt like all five friends who are the characters in this novel are depressed to various degrees. So, all things combined, this was no fun.