Oh, I am in two minds about this book. The larger part of mind really enjoys the main character. Aza is suffering from mental illness, and it's not an illness that I'm at all familiar with, really, but the portrayal of it was genuinely affecting. There's an underlying image of a spiral woven through this book and I could feel her thoughts taking on that shape over and over. Everything about Aza herself, and about her illness, is just so well done. It felt believable, and awful, and threatening. It felt realistic, too, in the way that it affected Aza's relationships with other people. In fact, I think my favourite part of the book is Aza's relationship with best friend Daisy, and how Aza's illness can at times come between them but that they're both determined to maintain the friendship anyway, despite any and all challenges and feelings of sometimes resentment.

I wish Green had kept the focus of the book on that relationship. Instead there's also a love interest, which drops this book down to three stars when, without Davis, I think I'd have given it four. It's not that I object to romance in novels, far from it, but come on... the son of a missing criminal billionaire? Everything about that storyline is ludicrously over the top. I can't take it seriously for a minute. To be honest, it reminds me a bit of the only other Green novel I've read. I also loved the main character of The Fault in Our Stars, and I also found her boyfriend/love interest deeply uninteresting. I don't know whether it's that Green is better at writing teen girls than he is teen boys, or if it's the first person narrative that makes the difference, but while I find his voice so likeable to read, he's zero for two on compelling romance, at least for me.