Book Review: "Just Stab Me Now" by Jill Bearup

Welcome to The Princess Bride, with extra strangeness.

This review will be a little different today. Because we’re going to show you the whole book … because the author started by making this a comedy routine on YouTube.

Jill Bearup is a YouTuber whose hobbies include the art of staged combat. Many of her videos center around fights in media, as well as armor and weaponry.

A few years ago, she made a series of shorts that lampooned fantasy romance tropes … all the romance tropes. The series focused on the discussion between the author, Caroline, and the heroine, Rosamund.

This is the series in one video, assuming YouTube doesn’t do something stupid. Again.

The series was so popular, fans of the series demanded that Jill Bearup write a novel.

The result is Just Stab Me Now.

The Story

I will assume you have not watched the above video. If you have, please bear with us.

Caroline Lindley is a mid-tier author who tries not to let her day job as a database administrator get in the way of her writing career. Mostly, Caroline writes about cozies centered around a coffeeshop. But now she is going to write fantasy romance!

If only the characters would cooperate.

The nineteen-year-old heroine has turned into a thirty-six-year-old widow named Rosamund. Captain Leo Collins, the “Hot Enemy” in this enemies-to-lovers trope, looks suspiciously like Caroline’s editor. And they are all giving Caroline lip.

While in the book, Rosamund and Collins are on a mission to get a peace treaty signed… if only their author would stop appearing in their book and meddling.

When Jill Bearup tried to get this book traditionally published, the universal reply was “We like this book, we just can’t market it.” While the Amazon description hearkens to Terry Prachett, I would argue that Just Stab Me Now has more in common with The Princess Bride novel. Like William Goldman’s original novel, there is our fantasy story, and there’s the meta-universe.

Unlike The Princess Bride, Bearup created a fictional author with her own character arc to go through, differentiating it from Goldman’s meta-fiction that he himself is a part of.

You would think Caroline popping in and out of the narrative would be a distraction, or that Bearup’s multiple-font system to convey point of view would be a pain. They both work.

One of our modern-day concerns is that if the author is a woman, and the main character is a woman, the female lead in the story will out-fight, out-think, and be superior to her male counterpart in every way, making the reason for his existence to be a punching bag for her. That is not a problem here. They each have different strengths that balance out the narrative. Rosamund is no bitch girl boss here, perhaps more what John C. Wright referred to as an “action girl.” She gets into three fights in the entire story, and it’s all surprisingly realistic melee combat, utilizing a sort of sword judo at one point (read it, it’ll make sense). In fact, there is a scene where Rosamund spends half a page contemplating how, if she gets into a fight, she will get her butt kicked—and I can’t help but wonder if Jill Bearup deliberately put that scene in to deliberately counter the trend of catering to “modern audiences.”

Interesting thing about Just Stab Me Now is where it deviates from the original series of shorts on YouTube. very few sections are just cut and paste, much to my surprise. It treats the original series as an outline. All to the book's credit.

Another difference is how Caroline interacts with her characters. She's not limited to interacting with just one. Funny enough, Bearup does capture writer character problems— when the characters develop free will and make choices on their own, and having two problems solve each other even if it wasn’t in the outline. It's good enough to explain writer schizophrenia, even if it doesn't capture it perfectly. (My personal experience with writing never sees me having a direct conversation with characters, their random events and independent choices just sort of … happen.)

The Characters

As I alluded to above, this has an interesting four person rotating POV.

We have Caroline, the author, who is fighting with her characters, struggling under an overbearing boss who makes both of her jobs difficult, and has unresolved feelings for her own editor. She has work to do.

The editor, Henry, is a relatively minor character in this novel, but he has an amusing perspective that highlights parts of the story we wouldn’t otherwise get. Bearup tells the story through a strict third-person personal perspective—we see things through the character’s eyes, and we are severely limited to what what know, and no more. Henry’s view on Caroline help shape her more.

Our two romance characters are also well-developed. Part of the joke is that they are too well-developed to be trapped in the tropes Caroline wants them to be in.

Rosamund is recently widowed with two children, her husband murdered less than a year ago. And if she thinks she’s having a bad time of it now, just wait until she learns while he was killed. She is logical, she overthinks problems, she is bound by duty … which leaves little room for romance, driving Caroline crazy. While she carries more knives on her than a Ginsu outlet story, she isn’t getting into fistfights, and she well knows her limitations.

Captain Leo Collins is taciturn, has no skill in diplomacy, and is quite bemused by the games the aristocracy play. He has other layers to his character, but those are spoilers.

The World

The fantasy world is interesting. The geopolitics is as serious as Game of Thrones (lacking the sexual perversion and murder porn) with enough social etiquette to make for some comedy on par with h Jane Austin. There are two warring kingdoms, our two leads are from opposite sides of the conflict, and they act as couriers.

I find it interesting that Bearup went through a lot of trouble to insert a religion in the book. It’s clearly “Christianity with serial numbers rubbed off” and I’m not sure she scrubbed very hard.

There is a little bit of magic thrown in there, and fantasy medical remedies, but the entire thing is fleshed out just enough to get the plot going. This isn’t Tolkien. But it has slight similarities to David Weber orders a pizza.

Politics

There are no modern politics in here. At all. Zero. There is none of “the message.” There’s no rewriting for “modern audiences.” It’s just a simple fantasy romance … with the authors personal problems thrown in for good measure.

Content Warning

The harshest I think this gets is PG-13. It helps that “Caroline” is squeamish about certain scenes, and prefers they fade to black.

Who is it for?

Frankly if you like The Princess Bride, I think you’ll like this one. Unlike Goldman’s work, the characters get paragraphs of backstory instead of pages, but it’s the closest work I could accurately compare this to in my experience.

Why buy it?

Is this a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? Nope. But it’s fun.