Review Detail

This book was honestly a train wreck from start to finish.

I was intrigued by this book because the cover was pretty and the synopsis sounded good. Hate-to-love romance? Sign me up! And I read a little bit of the book before I bought it and it seemed good. Unfortunately, that’s where the good parts about this book ended.

This was not a hate-to-love romance. This was a hate-to-weird romance. The romance was just so bizarre because the main character and the love interest were honestly just terrible people. They also couldn’t communicate like normal people so their relationship was incredibly dysfunctional.

I also just disliked them both so much as people that rooting for them as a couple was hard to do. They were both awful and there was nothing really redeeming about either one of them. The main character was such a terrible friend that I couldn’t stand her in that respect. And her and the love interest were both just so manipulative. They were honestly just some of the worst people I’ve ever read about.

I also hated the mom in this book. She was just the absolute worst. She gave her daughter such a complex about being a perfect person and put such high expectations on her; meanwhile, she’s a terrible person herself and is the farthest thing from perfect. It was just abominable and it was never really dealt with. It was basically just one fight scene and then everything was forgiven.

The writing was also really weird. It was very choppy and kind of messy. There were no transitions between scenes and there was a lot of just plopping of information about characters in a way that just felt really disjointed and weird. The author would also just expect the reader to figure certain things out that were going on. For instance, the main character plays volleyball, but instead of being like “the next day, at volleyball practice...” she just explained what the character was doing during practice and left the reader to figure out that she was playing volleyball based on that alone. I figured it out, but it would have been nice if she made it clearer that that’s what she was doing instead of just expecting the reader to get that with no prior information that the character even played volleyball.

The other thing that really bothered me was that the main character had serious anxiety problems, but nothing was ever done about it. She would have panic attacks and was basically super high strung all the time but she never actually did anything to get help for it. And I know not everyone seeks help for mental health issues, but in a book that teens will be reading and who might be struggling with the same issues, it would’ve been nice if the author had said something in the story about seeking help for that kind of thing. She mentioned something in an author’s note, but not everyone reads those and I think it’s important to address it in the story itself because that’s what people focus on. The main character had such unhealthy coping mechanisms and I worry that a teenager who reads this who deals with anxiety like the main character might not seek the help they need to get better because the main character never does. Even if she had just talked to a friend or a teacher or a parent about her problems instead of a therapist, that would’ve been better than just not having her get any help at all. I think that was a major oversight and it bothered me a lot.

Oh, also, there was this whole thing that the author was trying to say about how boys and girls are held to different standards in society. But a) we already knew that, so it was kind of pointless to make that statement here and b) it got so lost in the mess of this book that it lost all meaning.

Overall, this book was a hot mess from start to finish and I would not recommend it to anyone.