Reviews

I'm kinda mixed on this in a weird way. On one hand I felt it was very dry and left a lot to be desired. On the other after it got over the twist and the "shit hit the fan" moment I couldn't stop reading. It felt like 2 completely different books honestly. I really wish the revelation came much much sooner in the book and we then had a lot more time to explore that because I'll be honest the parts before just didn't really get my interest.

The characters where a bit hit or miss. I think Kat was about the only one who actually got fleshed out properly through the book. There was some info dumping right at the end about another character, but it was all told and not shown to us throughout the book really. The other 2 girls felt somewhat one sided and very just "quirkly not like other girls" teens. I also didn't get what was meant to be queer or not. The official content warnings list lesbophobia but like, I barely got the sapphic side let alone the phobia lol. It felt like the book wasn't too sure if it wanted to be about female friendships or female gays.

The worldbuilding and setting actually really interested me - after the reveal lol. It was pretty obvious where it was headed, but once shit broke out there was some nice smaller reveals and revelations that helped things along. I think it was a decently unique take on the concept despite the concept not being unique itself, the setup and catalyst for it all though I felt was incredibly weak and just.... Didn't really make sense NGL.

The writing itself was a bit weird. There was odd chapters like the diary chapters that made it feel like I was reading a younger YA book (in a negative way aha..) but then other chapters where it felt like an adult horror. I would love to know which author wrote which parts honestly because I think you can tell with how wildly different in terms of writing some parts are to others.
I really don't know what demographic this should go under.

The sensitive topics I actually didn't think they where handled too well. It tried to tackle *so* much at once, so many very very sensitive topics that are quite taboo, but it felt like they got used to push the story along and not really having any consequence, not really any resolution, not really a message of "don't do this" or "don't act like this" etc.
Content warning, explicit self harm and really bad representation of it:

The self harming scenes specifically just rubbed me the wrong way. The fact one of the girls self harms is used as a punchline in an argument, is used to just show how "broken" she is, and there's multiple long very graphic scenes of her doing it in detail...... Just to tell us more about how broken she is? The final time it happens too it's used *specifically* and only to move the plot along into the big shit hitting the fan moment. It's just used as a plot device and yeah, I don't think that's good to have.

The essentially child abuse also gets glossed over quite a bit and it's a bit mad ngl.

I think this book would have been a ton better if the opening "normality" bit was like, a handful of chapters long and the shit hit the fan moment happened at like, 15-20% in. Instead of over halfway in.

Content Warnings

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