Another day, another salty review. This is gonna be a long one.

The first book I read by this author was Letters to the Lost. I loved it. When I picked up the companion the next year, I was left disappointed. It followed a character I'd loved in LTTL, but I just didn't connect with the story or his love interest.
I'm also in the minority with A Curse So Dark and Lonely. I didn't love it nearly as much as everyone else seems to. Even so, when I heard about this book, I was optimistic. I was hopeful that she would be getting back to what I loved about LTTL: strong characters working through their grief and the consequences of their choices.
Now, after finished CIWYW, I'm faced with the very real possibility that LTTL might just have been a fluke. Well, not the book itself, but my reaction to it. Maybe this author just isn't for me. But I do have a lot of issues with the book, so let's get into it.

For starters, nothing in this book makes any sense. The details we're fed about the different situations that lead our characters to this point feel incredibly contrived and lacking in common sense. Examples:

1. Maegan was caught cheating on the SAT prior to the events of CIWYW. She states in the book that because of her cheating, over 100 kids had their tests voided because 'there was no way for them to know how many tests were compromised.' This leads to her being ostracized by the entire school, minus her best friend who we know next to nothing about. This made zero sense to me when I read it. How would anyone else's test be 'compromised'? I expected that maybe there was more to the story. That could also be because the writing and dialogue when referring to this incident are very vague. So when we're finally let in on the details of what happened, it makes this all even more strange. So the story is: She was stressed about having to be the perfect child. She went into the SAT, sat next to a guy who she knew had already scored a 1500 on the test, and looked at his paper as he took the test. Then she was caught. Somehow, this leads to EVERYONE in the room having their tests invalidated because...reasons? Because the author needed her female protagonist isolated and cast out? I was curious enough that I looked it up and nowhere did I see anything about what the author describes actually being a thing that happens.

2. Rob's issues stem from his father conning a bunch of people out of their life savings. His father tried and failed to kill himself, which has left him in a very altered state. He can't speak or move, meaning he can't take care of himself at all. So it's been left to Rob (and his mom, but mostly Rob) to take care of him. Everyone at school hates him because they assume that he knew about his father's shady business dealings. Why? Because he was an intern at his father's company one summer. So first of all, I doubt many interns are brought in on the ILLEGAL business deals the bosses are making. That's not exactly what interns do. They get coffee, take lunch orders, make copies, deliver mail...just because Rob is the son of the boss doesn't mean he'd be given all the company secrets. Actually BECAUSE he is the son of the boss he probably wouldn't be told any of these things. If I was involved in something illegal like that, there's NO way I would want my kid to know about it. It just doesn't make sense that everyone suspects that he was in on it, except for the fact that it makes him a social pariah and the author needs him to be an outcast in order for the story to work.

3. Connor, Rob's ex-friend, treats him like shit for zero reason. He's the son of Rob's dad's partner, who turned Rob's dad in (yes, this story really is as convoluted as it seems). He spends the first 75% of this book bullying Rob, just to turn around at the end and tell Rob his dad made him cut Rob off and he really cared about him and wanted to reach out and blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry, but no. Nope. Even if Connor's dad told him not to have anything to do with Rob, it doesn't track that Connor would then resort to bullying him. The author tries to lay the groundwork early on that Connor actually does care about him in some way when Owen (another underutilized side character) throws out the 'the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference' cliche, but I'm sorry. No. The author made him too mean if it was her intent to redeem his character and their friendship. Some of the things he says to Rob are absolutely heinous, and I don't feel that character earned his redemption.

4. If Owen was always the kid eating the free cheese sandwich (like we're told later on in the book) how on Earth would his mother have had the money to invest with Rob's dad in the first place?

5. If Connor's dad knew Rob didn't have any knowledge of the illegal doings of Rob's dad, why was he so dismissive of the idea when he caught Rob in his office? It's obviously something to throw readers off the scent of Connor's dad, but in hindsight, knowing that Connor's dad was the mastermind of the whole scheme, him 'not believing' Rob doesn't make any sense. Also, the 'reveal' that Connor's dad was guilty the whole time was so anticlimactic. I'm not sure how you could get more that 25 pages into this book without assuming that Connor's dad is also guilty. Just saying.

6. Maegan is shocked that Connor actually cares about his grades and is intelligent. She assumes that he is just some jock. This is despite the fact that they are in the SAME AP Calculus class. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was just trying to skate through high school with grades good enough that I wouldn't be kicked off a sports team, AP Calc is the LAST class I'd be taking.

There are so many more non-sensical WTF moments in this mess of a book, but you get the idea.

I think my other issue with this is that there is SO. MUCH. MELODRAMA. So many angsty, unnecessary subplots all to make our hero learn a lesson I'm pretty sure I knew before I started kindergarten: stealing is wrong, and you shouldn't judge someone when you don't have all the facts.
Something this author likes to do is give her characters a ton of baggage and this book is no exception. Rob has a father who is fully reliant on other people for his day-to-day survival; his mother has been drinking too much and leaving Rob to take care of his father on his own; everyone at school hates him. Maegan isn't much better off: She was caught cheating on the SAT; everyone assumes she is a cheater (which she IS, even though the narrative tries to soften it up.); her sister has thrown the family into upheaval when she comes home from her freshman year at college pregnant with her married professor's baby which is going to cause her to lose her scholarship unless she gets an abortion but she doesn't know if she wants to get an abortion but she DOES want to go out and party and get drunk (yes, that run on sentence is intentional.). It's just a LOT. And by the end of the book everything is so convoluted that nothing feels like it was resolved in a manner that feels satisfactory.

I could go on about the things I didn't like about this book but I'd rather move on to something I'll hopefully enjoy better. Or maybe I'll go back to LTTL and see if I still feel the same way. Perhaps I'm getting to a point where angsty romances about teenagers just isn't intriguing for me anymore. For the record, I'm not trying to dismiss or downplay YA romance. I'm just acknowledging that as a woman who is closer to 40 than 20, maybe these kind of books just aren't for me any longer, and that's okay.