A review by hxppyhxt
Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Did not finish book.
slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

2 Stars instead of 1 because I really enjoyed the first half or so of the book.
Far too long of a book. I really enjoyed the first half or so of the book, then I got to the point where I was like there is still half of this book to read and everything in the summary has been done. And the random capitalization in words was so annoying, I thought they would spell something (especially when the author set this up to be the case with 
Spoilerthe journal) but spelling them out in many places was just fruitless. Very frustrating. I decided to DNF after an entire chapter of the uppercase nonsense where I spent so long trying to decode it only to get something along the lines of "HIMEEEEEEEIEEE". So many "hE". I thought that maybe it was intentional to just refer to a specific character in this way, but then even within the chapter it was not consistently "hE", sometimes it would just be a normal "he", which blew that theory out of the water. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure it out but honestly it got to the point where I didn't even care enough to figure it out.
Some of the twists were well set up so that you could figure them out or at least get a sense that something was amiss. Others felt completely random and felt like they had virtually no setup or foreshadowing.
SpoilerI don't mind some religious undertones, but in this case it really felt like two different books. The first half really had very little indication that the plot was headed towards a Christian allegory, and then in the second half it just felt like "and guess what, this is Satan. Oh and this? Yea she's actually the Virgin Mary. Oh yea, this is God. This is the Tree of Good and Evil. This is Eve, you know from the garden of Eden? And this is literal Hell" and on and on. I feel like setting it up more at the beginning would have made it feel less random.
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