Bromance With a Silent B

Two neighbors. One’s a German athlete who reads sci-fi. The other’s a chaos-gremlin tech nerd who somehow thinks jogging counts as cardio. They should have nothing in common. And yet… somehow they become friends. Then roommates. Then—well, you can probably guess where this is going.Look, I’m going to save you some time here.This book has a “jock who reads sci-fi” and a “super geek chaos gremlin who jogs” becoming friends. Already unrealistic, right? Gets worse. The athletic German guy somehow thinks teaching a basement-dwelling ADHD disaster to do deadlifts is a good use of his time. The tech gremlin somehow gets abs. Absolutely ridiculous.They become roommates (cliché #1), share exactly one brain cell during lockdown (cliché #2), and pine for each other while being completely oblivious (cliché #3 through #47).Oh, and because apparently we’re required by law to mention it in 2025: one of them works at an AI startup. No, the AI doesn’t become sentient. No, it doesn’t write their love letters. It mostly just crashes their servers and burns through venture capital. The most unrealistic part? The tech bro is actually nice.There’s family drama that would make a Hallmark movie say “tone it down.” Someone’s parent gets sick. Someone else’s parent literally dies. There’s a wedding in Africa with actual lions, because apparently we’re just throwing darts at a trope board now.The whole thing devolves into two supposedly grown men having feelings—actual feelings—while playing video games and arguing about whether Star Wars or Star Trek is superior. One of them is apparently demisexual, which he figures out somewhere between teaching his disaster neighbor proper pull-up form and a museum date about perspective art. (Yes, a museum date. I warned you.)Absolutely nothing explodes. Nobody gets superpowers. The most dramatic battle involves a lawnmower that won’t start.You should definitely skip this and go replay Elden Ring instead.But if you’re the kind of person who cries at the ending of Portal 2, thinks “gaming marathon” counts as quality time, and has ever explained your feelings using D&D metaphors… I can’t stop you.Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the feelings.