<b>Quick Stats</b>
Age Rating: 13+
Over All: 3 stars
Plot: 3/5
Characters: 3/5
Setting: 3/5
Writing: 3/5

So I originally started this book thinking it takes place where I live—turns out it doesn’t—and because the premise had me intrigued. Childhood friends to strangers to academic rivals to lovers? It sounded right up my alley. Unfortunately, the execution didn’t cut it for me.
The dialogue, especially the between Ezra and Sasha, was off at the beginning. I just kept thinking <i>people don’t talk like this</i> It wasn’t necessarily the content of the dialogue, but there was just something off about the way it was said. I couldn’t put a finger on what, but in the beginning—especially the first two or three interactions between the two of them—there was something about their interactions that felt fake, stilted. This lessened the further I got into the book, but there was always around one conversation every chapter or two where the dialogue felt off or lacking.
My main issue with the book was that it all felt very surface level. Sasha had her goals, she had her traumas and her neuroses, but there was nothing outside of that. She didn’t have a personality. No one in the book seemed to go beyond the few labels slapped on them. They felt very 2D. This lack of character development led to a lacking in most other areas, too. There was no chemistry between Sasha and Ezra, and no convincing emotional ties between her and her friends either.
This book dealt with a lot of important, emotional topics: race, socioeconomic class, parent loss and grief, and divorce, but it doesn’t truly dig into any of it. There are passing mentions, but they aren’t explored for more than a few sentences here or there, and they are never discussed in a way that gave them any emotional weight, in my opinion. It was all too fleeting.
This book was very short and very fast paced, and I think that was both the saving grace and the downfall of this book. It needed more: more depth, more development, more emotion. That can’t be done without making it longer (or re-prioritizing some scenes). However, I think the only reason I gave this book 3 stars was because I was able to fly through it. If it had been even 5o more pages at the level that the current book is at, it would have gotten harder to sit through, and I likely would have DNFed or given it a lower rating.
In the end, I don’t think this is an inherently bad book. It was underwhelming for me, but I could see other readers feeling differently about it.