Supermarket by Bobby Hall (a.k.a. Logic)

Title: Supermarket

Author: Bobby Hall

Published: March 6, 2019

Rating: ⭑

“As soon as they give a reason for why they can't do something, they're already defeated.”

Hooray! A rant review!

As a preface, if you are for some reason emotionally attached to this book, or if more negative reviews aren’t your speed, may I suggest you check out one of the reviews for a book I enjoyed more than this one. Which would be… pretty much everything else on the site. Let’s begin!

The plot of this story revolves around twenty-something Flynn who decides that in order to finish his novel about a supermarket, he must begin working at a grocery store. Flynn’s novel is truly his white whale; his girlfriend has recently broken up with him because he can never finish anything, so he has twenty years of angst riding on his book. Things get complicated for Flynn when he begins to uncover a series of mental health troubles that begin affecting both his work and personal life.

Hhhhhh.... (that’s a very long and defeated sigh). Woof. This book was so bad. This piece was a bummer because it reaffirmed for me the idea that once someone has success in any field, they can go and get a book published. And this book is a *best seller.* Because Logic wrote it. And if I had paid attention to the author I honestly would not have picked it up. I for the most part don’t hate Logic’s music, but he literally mentioned in his acknowledgements that he binge-read novels for a week “for the first time” in his life, and then decided he was going to write a book.

This has been said in other reviews, but it truly is written as if it was penned by a sophomore in high school. The grasp on voice is so slim, the concept of proper grammar so faint it is near-invisible. This is the manuscript your college boyfriend hands you halfway through his fall semester as a first-year creative writing student. Flynn screams unreliable narrator the entire time, and by the time you reach Hall’s “twists,” you had seen them coming from six miles away. There’s also a bunch of small asides where Hall is prideful about breaking the fourth wall, but they are so obnoxious to read.

Bummer fuel 2.0– I think this book has some bits of a really important story: the protagonist combats a slough of mental disorders throughout the book, a couple of them hugely underrepresented in popular media. Which is why it super blows that this book was written so poorly. Because of its NYT bestseller status, the picture of these mental illnesses is painted billboard-style big, and not very tastefully, to a giant audience. I think there’s an important story here somewhere, but I also think that it maybe should have been told by someone else.

It was irritating to read this because, yes, it is an important story and it is important for any author to have an outlet to convey their experiences, but it was written in such a juvenile manner. Success in one field should not guarantee success in another. The story of mental health is an important one to tell, but I can’t help but feel that these underrepresented illnesses could have been delivered a different way.