Reviews

The reason I gave this book 2.75 stars isn’t necessarily because it’s bad, it's actually really close to three stars. I just felt that it was a strongly average book. Whilst it did cover topics of importance, which I will get to later, I still feel that this book doesn’t deserve a rating any higher than the one I decided to give it. As I said, I don’t really dislike the book but I do feel that it’s important for me to explain a few of the reasons why I gave it an average review and not a good one, especially since this book has a high average rating here on Storygraph and it seems that a lot of people really enjoyed it.

Let’s start from the beginning and talk about Annie, one of the first characters we were introduced to in this book. The problem with talking about her is that we don’t really get to know much about her at all, so there really isn’t much to say. In the beginning, it felt like she was going to be an important character in the story, given her relationship with one of the actual main characters in this book. But we learned absolutely nothing about her except her extreme love and attraction for Sara (one of the main characters). I really wish we could have learned more about her, maybe why she loved Sara so much, how her life was, and why she made the decisions that she made that were revealed towards the end of the story.

Just like with Annie, there were a lot of other characters that were included in the story and who were mentioned a good amount of times but it didn’t feel like we got to know them that well either. For example Sara’s friends, how were they affected by what happened with Sara? Of course, the story is allowed to be centered around mostly Emilie and Sara but since it is literary fiction, it feels like it would make sense to hear about other characters too. Maybe this is only my opinion though.

As I mentioned before, a couple of hard topics were mentioned in this book so I would definitely recommend reading the content warnings before starting the book. A couple of the mentioned topics were drug abuse, sexual abuse, death, and grief. Both the women deal with their own set of problems and trauma. You could say that they were both trying to find out how they fit in the world and who they were. Throughout the story, they drift in and out of contact with each other. They made choices that were questionable but that also added to the reality of their characters so there really isn’t much to judge.

Something that did make it harder for me to get through though was the length of the chapters. One of the chapters was close to 60 pages and others were around 30-45 which for me is simply too long. It made it slow to read. When I finished the whole book it felt like it had taken me around 10 hours to read even though it actually only took me a bit over 5 hours. The chapters just felt unnecessarily long for the shortness of the book.

It felt like the writing style was also a bit weird but I’m not sure if that’s just me. It just felt choppy at times, like there were too many full stops and not full sentences. For example, “She climbed higher and higher and off the trail, found their grove. No one was there. She hiked down to the main path, discovered other trails.” or, “Sara craved them. Wanted to touch them, asked if she could, was granted permission.” or, “On the sidewalk now, keys in her hand now, car door open, engine started.”. There were many more examples of this. It might just be me but it sounds wrong, like I said, choppy.

The book altogether wasn’t that bad, I didn’t love reading it but it wasn’t a terrible time either. It was just plainly average to me.