Books book reviews Surreal Video Games & Friendship Growing Pains in The L.O.V.E. Club by Lio Min Alex Brown reviews “a beautiful, sad story with more twists and turns than a murder mystery…” By Alex Brown | Published on September 29, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Childhood friendships can be complicated, fraught things, especially as children age into teens. Suddenly there are all these new pressures and conflicts. The things that once united a group of kids are now causing fractures. Add to that generational trauma, domestic violence, patriarchy, racial tension, sexual misconduct, eating disorders, and video games and you get Lio Min’s devastating new young adult speculative novel The L.O.V.E. Club. Liberty, O, Vera, and Elle are in middle school when they first meet. Four young girls who have already experienced too much of the world. They don’t have much in common other than feeling out of step with the rest of their Chinese-American community in the fictional California inland town of Calendula. By the time we meet them as teens, their hard lives have gotten even harder. Right around the time they were set to start high school, Elle vanished off the face of the earth. Not long after, Liberty and Vera left town and O, our narrator, behind. Now O, Liberty, and Vera are back together at Calendula Middle School, standing in front of a strange video game. Playing the game, Morning Glory, might tell them what happened to Elle, but is it real or a nightmare? Next thing they know, the three girls are sucked into the game as playable characters. Each girl gets their own level in which they must confront and reveal their worst moments. Liberty is trans, and is often either ostracized or fetishized for it. Sporty Vera doesn’t know how to be herself so she tries to become whatever each situation requires. O struggles with memory loss and feeling abandoned. Elle gets her own level, too, where we learn more about the abuse she suffered at the hands of people who were supposed to take care of her, as well as the abuse she unleashed on others.  The L.O.V.E. Club is a story about friendship, but in particular it’s about toxic friendships. These girls grow up in a noxious soup of oppression and let that form the foundation of their relationships with each other. Seemingly everything was a threat, so they learned to either lash out preemptively or retreat into themselves. They are hurt by others, they hurt each other, they hurt themselves. And Morning Glory drags all those deep, dark, painful memories into the light. Revelations about parental abuse, secret affairs, transphobic interactions, racism and fetishization, and teenage cruelty spill out. The girls have made a lot of mistakes over the years, and the game gives them the space to talk through them, reckon with the damage left in their wake, and take the first steps toward restitution or at least reconciliation.  Buy the Book The L.O.V.E. Club Lio Min Buy Book The L.O.V.E. Club Lio Min Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget From a structural perspective, the video game aspect often confused me. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how the levels or boss fights worked. I haven’t played a video game since Super Mario World was popular, so that might have a lot to do with my confusion. The boss fights, including when O would pull out her notebook, her in-game weapon, and write out complex and poetic commands, were beautifully written. However, I also think that Min’s flowery narrative style was a hindrance when it came to explaining the mechanics of a thing. Min plays with the physical layout of the text on the page and utilizes different fonts for different characters, which is both fun and innovative and also sometimes very difficult to read. At one point, several characters are speaking in all caps, and it not only is a struggle to get through what is essentially being shouted at but also hard to keep track of who is speaking. Yet, I think it’s also kind of the point. These structural and stylistic choices punch up the emotions in the text itself until it’s almost a physical force. It’s clever from a craft perspective, even if it’s not always easy to read. Towards the end of the novel, one character tells O, the protagonist, “You both write with this lush and lyrical style that’s… honestly hard to follow. But I wanted to try, to chase you through the labyrinths your mind naturally called home.” That is the perfect description of what it’s like reading this book. The L.O.V.E. Club is a beautiful, sad story with more twists and turns than a murder mystery. Lio Min is an excellent writer whose style can sometimes overwhelm the story they’re trying to tell. This book will keep you on the edge of your seat and then break your heart, and I mean that as a compliment. Min’s Calendula is a vivid, realistic town (if you, like I am, are from a California town a ways away from a metro area, a lot about the setting will probably feel eerily familiar) populated with troubled, messy characters. Min offers no easy answers or short cuts, something I think teens craving stories about platonic relationships will relish. [end-mark] The L.O.V.E. Club is published by Flatiron Books. The post Surreal Video Games & Friendship Growing Pains in <i>The L.O.V.E. Club</i> by Lio Min appeared first on Reactor.