content warnings: death, grief
representation: sapphic main character, side mexican-american bi/pan character, side latinx characters


“We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”


Sorry guys, but this book is genuinely terrible. I love Nina LaCour (Everything Leads to You is one of my favourite YA romcom's) and I can appreciate how personal this book must be for her, but guys, it was so bad.

The book revolves around Marin over the course of a weekend of her winter break during her first year at college as her friend, Mabel, comes to visit her. The two haven't seen each other since a tragedy occurred and Marin ran from home to college.

As you can probably guess, this book doesn't have a plot, which is fine. I love contemporaries that aren't really about much and focus more on themes than events. But if you're going to write a plotless book, then you need to make sure that your characters are interesting enough to keep the story going. This is the main area where this book completely falls apart.

There is not a single character with anything even resembling a personality. Marin's entire personality throughout the entire book is Sad, which, while being a Big Mood, makes for a really shitty protagonist. Then every other characters personality and story all revolve around the way they feel about Marin, with Mabel being the most egregious example.

When you don't care about the characters and there's no plot, that makes your book unbearably boring, to the point where I skimmed the last half of the book. If it wasn't so short I would have just DNFd it.

Now, let's get into nitpicks, because y'all know I have them:
- Personally, Mabel being Mexican felt a lot like tokenism.
- There are a few really uncomfortable passages about mental health. One in particular was Marin comparing a woman she believes to be mentally ill to Bertha from Jane Eyre, i.e. Mr Rochester's ~~ crazy ~~ ex wife he keeps locked in the attic.
- I get that Marin loves English, but her constant name dropping came off as so pretentious sometimes. I was fine with her constant references to Jane Eyre and the discussions about literature, but when it got to them talking about how great Sylvia Plath was and only mentioning Lady Lazarus and Daddy, aka two of Plath's most well-known poems, it felt a lot like LaCour was just trying to prove to us that Marin liked English So Much.
- Are we still using the Esk*mo slur, really??

Don't waste your time on this, read literally any of Nina LaCour's other books instead.