Lenses & Letters is a story everyone can read — but only some can feel
It’s a quiet masterpiece of emotional complexity — a tender exploration of what it means to be seen, held and slowly undone by the people we love most.

Loved the shifting perspectives, Lenses & Letters doesn’t chase plot twists or loud confessions. It sits with silence, with things left unsaid, with the heaviness of love that refuses to fit into neat categories.

At times, the pacing the pacing seemed a little too long in stillness — but maybe that’s the point. Lenses & Letters isn’t trying to entertain. It’s trying to be honest.

And it succeeds — quietly, devastatingly, and with more heart than most stories dare to have.

Totally recommended.

A Literary Faceplant: Lenses & Letters is Proof That Not Everyone Should Write
Review by: A reader who died and came back to warn others

Reading Lenses & Letters is like being trapped in an all-girls sleepover where the only activity is whispering dramatic diary entries and crying over mood boards. It’s not just boring — it’s aggressively pointless. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to apologize to every tree that was sacrificed to print it.

Let’s be honest: nothing happens in this book. Nothing. At all. It’s 88 pages of mood swings, eye contact, and the world’s slowest, most uneventful descent into “emotional intimacy” that feels about as passionate as reading a manual for assembling IKEA furniture — in French — while blindfolded.

And the characters? If you stripped Rein and Aline of their caffeine addictions, camera obsessions, and "tragic-but-beautiful" trauma monologues, you'd be left with... actually, nothing. Two cardboard cutouts in trench coats wandering around Paris whispering at each other like emotionally damaged anime protagonists. Every time they interact, it’s like watching two depressed poetry majors flirt via sad emojis.

But let’s talk about the real star of this mess: the author, Jannat Shakeel.

Jannat writes with the confidence of someone who thinks journaling your thoughts at 2 a.m. automatically makes you deep. Every sentence screams, “I wear oversized sweaters and listen to Lana Del Rey — therefore I am profound.” She clearly sat down and thought, What if I made an entire book out of soft sighs, vintage filters, and the word “platonic” used so hard it lost all meaning?

There is so much self-indulgence in this novel, you’d think it was fan fiction of the author’s own Twitter drafts. I’m 98% sure Jannat wrote this entire book while staring wistfully out a window waiting for rain, blasting Taylor Swift, and whispering “I am the main character.”

It’s not that she can’t write — she can, technically. But someone needs to tell her that just because you can describe a forehead kiss in twelve adjectives doesn’t mean you should. Not every moment needs to feel like a perfume ad.

And who told her this needed a playlist? I’m sorry, but slapping a Lana Del Rey song at the top doesn’t turn a bland story into a vibe — it just makes it more painfully obvious how hard the book is trying to be "aesthetic."

Final Thoughts:
This wasn’t a story. It was a Pinterest board. A soft-filtered fever dream. A sad gay novella written by someone who thinks a lowercase font and emotional trauma = literature.

Recommendation: Only read this if:

1. You’re trapped in a cabin with no internet.

2. You’ve lost a bet.

3. You want to punish yourself for being happy.

Otherwise, save yourself the emotional decay and just scroll Tumblr for 10 minutes. It’s faster and has more plot.

One star. Not because it earned it, but because the rating system won’t let me give it a black hole.