A review by probably_reading_right_now
Ride or Die by James Newman

2.0

Struggled on what to rate this because some parts were positives, but ultimately the bad outweighs the good for me with this one. I really wanted to like this one the premise seemed promising, but the execution just wasn’t there. The dialogue and inner monologue felt very weird an unnatural to me it seemed very unlike a teenager/young woman, and there were so many abbreviations no one seriously uses that many especially not when speaking aloud to someone. It had the “I don’t listen to the band on my tshirt” girl stereotype which made me audibly groan; it just really felt like it wasn’t written from a teenager girl’s perspective. About 50 percent of the way through it got better, but still wasn’t great. The execution just wasn’t there because whatever the author was going for didn’t come across. This book has small sketches and an ‘evidence archive’ style timeline of text exchanges throughout and I love when books do this because it adds an authenticity, or realism to the story. Ultimately this came off as maybe a failed slasher, or splatter punk style story? It really just didn’t work for me which was disappointing because I wanted it to.