A review by liralen
Miss You Love You Hate You Bye by Abby Sher

3.0

Hank and Zoe are the best of friends, have been the best of friends for years. Hank is the rock, the quieter foil to Zoe's exuberance. Zoe is...Zoe is glitter and half-baked plans and enthusiasm; she's energy and explosions of colour. Except, lately, she's also too-thin limbs in undersized clothing that shouldn't fit, and she's bloody scratches on skin that can't be explained, and she's a furious spiral of self-destruction.

I don't think the book description for this one is particularly accurate. 'Zoe's perfect facade' is never a thing—Zoe loses her sparkle and her polish, yes, but more than any kind of perfection, I see her described as being ever on the edge of chaos, always on the verge of tumbling off the cliff and taking everyone else down with her. Hank's friendship with her is hard to watch: insular and codependent and always, it seems, with Hank left feeling responsible for things she cannot control.

There are some things that I appreciate quite a bit, though: the lack of romance in the book. (Can you imagine? Zoe having a romance would mean ten times the drama, ten times the spiralling, and ten times Hank's anxiety that she was on the verge of replacement, and Hank in a relationship would...would not go over well with Zoe). I'm also glad that things aren't completely wrapped up with a bow at the end:

Spoiler

Hank doesn't go running back to Zoe as soon as Zoe stops sending her wrath-filled letters blaming her for everything; Zoe isn't cured of all her ills; realistically, Hank is probably going to be lonely for a while.

But ideally, I think I'd have preferred to see a little less codependence throughout, and a little less relief at the end that

Spoiler

the relationship doesn't survive in its existing form

.