Book Review: ‘Blob: A Love Story’ by Maggie Su
My love for short, weird books about sad women in emotional and mental crisis doesn’t appear to be abating as I chose ‘Blob: A Love Story’ as my first read of 2025.
I hadn’t heard of this debut before I stumbled across the cover on NetGalley, got completely captured by the synopsis, and had to request a copy. The NetGalley gods were kind and I decided straight away that it was going to be my first read of the year.
“A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect man...
Vi Liu’s life is a mess. Having dropped out of college, she’s stuck in a job she hates at a local hotel. Her ex-boyfriend has blocked her and she’s lashing out at her family and co-workers.
One night, drunk outside a drag club, she stumbles across a mysterious sentient blob. She takes it home, where she feeds it a diet of sugary cereal and reality TV. Slowly, she realises that she can shape the blob into her perfect man: someone attentive, outgoing and with more than a passing resemblance to Ryan Gosling.
But is Bob the blob really the answer to all her problems, or a catalyst for further disaster? Sharp, strange and very funny, BLOB is a delightful story about growing up, fucking up and learning how to be a real person.”
I have to admit, that I was a little disappointed with the first half of ‘Blob’ and it took me an unexpectedly long time to get involved with the novel as Vi is very hard character to like, and the decisions she makes also makes her very unsympathetic at many points. She’s funny, but she’s very abrasive and doesn’t seem to actually like anyone in her life or treat them very well at all, and it’s a lot when she’s the centre of the story, especially when we go back and see her in her previous relationship as she mourns it and re-examines what went wrong, when it’s very obvious to the reader. Even for a while after discovering the blob, I was struggling.
Once the Blob becomes Bob and starts to become a man and Vi’s relationships with her colleague, Rachel; new friend, Elliott; and her family deteriorates (through her own actions and words), everything kicked into gear for me and I raced through the rest of the novel.
It was really interesting to see the ideas and conversations around how even though Vi made and formed Bob to her ideal, once he was formed he became his own person with ideas, motivations and reasons to pull himself away from Vi. It’s a really fascinating exploration of Vi’s reaction to that and the way it seems to confirm for her that she might be the problem, and gives her a chance to change and adapt how she lives and treats people. In that way ‘Blob’ is a strange, sad girl novel meets coming of age meets ‘Frankenstein’ inspired soft sci-fi/fantasy that all seems to blend together and make it a literary novel...
‘Blob: A Love Story’ is a bizarre, funny, startling debut novel that has made me really excited about Maggie Su as an author.
Thank you to Sceptre and NetGalley for the review copy.
Written by Sophie
