I really wish I could recall where I heard about this book and what prompted me to want to read it. Not necessarily because I found it bad, although I sure as heck didn't find it stellar. But because I was really curious as to what drew Past Me to this.

Essentially what it boiled down to me was that it was an interesting premise but the execution of it was not as well done as one would have liked. When you're hauling a 514 page book around, you kind of expect every moment to matter and not everything did. Sure there were some things that seemed one-offs that ended up panning out. But a lot of the others were decidedly unimportant. Like the Bluebloods. Without getting into spoiler territory, they were for the most part unimportant. Their only important contribution should have been to draw Blue to Hannah and that's it. I neither needed, nor wanted, their tragic backstories. Because Blue's was more than enough.

The constant need of Blue to mirror the importance of the chapters with another moment of actual and/or literary history grated after a while. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the books that shared the chapter titles knew going in what they could expect, especially as the story unfolded. There was no need to double down on that and it only served to make Blue seem more pretentious than her peers thought her to be.

Her dad. Ugh. Just ugh. To say anymore may broach into spoiler territory but suffice to say he goes into the barrel of terrible fathers along with the ones from "The Undoing of Thistle Tate" and "Ghosts".

The book did eventually pick up and went faster than it had been, plot wise eventually. But this was after the mid-point mark. And then it was a rush of things that just flew at Blue like so many airborne missiles. Quite frankly I'm surprised she wasn't writing this from some sort of asylum instead of Harvard. And by the time I got to the end, it felt like not enough of a payout for the build up.

I know most people think, to paraphrase a well-known quote, that a book can't be too long. But I disagree. This book easily could have had anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pages cut and still bean as well received as it was. It may have made more of an impact on me had it been to be perfectly honest. As it was, while I didn't hate, I didn't love it and as best am left with a lukewarm feeling. This isn't one I'll re-read and I likely only pushed through because it was my choice for my book club. Otherwise it may have joined the other books that I DNFed this year since by page 250 I felt it was still dragging.

Again it was okay but temper your expectations as I found it nowhere near as stellar as the reviews would have you believe.