As soon as you discover this is about a 13 year old and mid 20s guy having a romance, you ought to be reading this critically. And it’s my view that doesn’t do near enough work to earn the ending or to not be purely a romanticization of problematic issues without nuance, proper characterization, and believability.

For one, the characters characterization is built up prior to their relationship changing from a caregiver family friend to a sexualized one. As soon as it begins the story becomes plot driven, though still somewhat believable in terms of character driven plot.

However, as soon as that happens, every POV up until the aunt discovering their relationship completely romantizes every interaction they have. Even other people, usually girls, characterize Wavy as powerful, sexy, and beyond her years. And everyone else just sort of succumbs to her newly found mystique. As though she is wise beyond her years and somehow has agency.

Here’s the thing: the author frames the story so this isn’t objective. We are out into the headspace of purely the people who do not object to this, with the very small occasion of an adult being idk man, but does seem like they care about each other from what I can see.

There is no detail or scene given as much time as the sex and romantic aspects of their relationship. And every other perspective of people who aren’t Wavy’s cousins or friends are framed as antagonistic without us granted the same headspace as those people who approve of their being together. Even the apparent consent of the parents to the couple is glossed over to feed a plot point, rather than give nuance to the actual relationship.

Afterward the sexualization of Wavy, at 13, the agent of sexual awakening, apparently, and for the later entire half of the entire novel, there’s little to no characterization whatsoever. They no longer feel like they’re going to be fleshed out as actual people as their headspace is dominated by their thoughts of one another and there is no description, action, or any work at all to demonstrate that they’re lived in. And it also skates over things that would have had to have happened in this case.

Yeah, they’re broken people but even people who do not emotionally develop because of trauma are still situated in time and place and move through the world. Why did Wavy get no counselling? I’m not sure she could have actually refused a medical examination, or did she never go to the doctor ever in her life? Which would have negated a anticlimactic reveal.

They do not feel like real people, just vehicles for a question the author wants explored: Is there a situation in which this kind of relationship would be okay? The answer being, in a long enough time line and environmental factors adding two broken people, it’s the only way they can be okay, possibly.

Yet, the decision is made already by virtue of whose voices are given screen time, how those voices are slanted, and what information we are restricted from having. In a broken sort of way, a broken relationship can still be beautiful and true, right?

Except we don’t even get a full picture of the ways in which those traumas actually affect them at the time, nor the full effect. The only external factors are the system that rejects their relationship and their internalized beliefs about their relationship. Both serve no nuance. I don’t even buy the judge granting the other based on what Wavy said. Especially without a psych evaluation.

The head hopping wants to give the illusion that this is objective but reality is the farthest from intruding. The only thing the story succeeds at is romanticizing a very problematic relationship, in which no consent is possible - and the fact that the system does not support people with trauma.

Though, what the contours of their trauma actually are, who possibly knows.