10/08/19: Reread for the #aliceosemanreadathon. Two new thoughts:
1. I love how Tori’s depression is depicted and the fact that everyone just keeps telling her to “stop being such a pessimist” and “just smile more”.
2. Spoiler Lucas not being the love interest is a breath of fresh air. Usually the guy who’s obsessively “in love” with the main girl ends up getting rewarded because she then falls in love with him too, but in this Tori calls him out for being a creep and ultimately forgives him but doesn’t end up having romantic feelings for him.

27/10/18: First read.

content warnings: violence, injuries, self-harm, discussions of the effects of having an eating disorder, homophobia, ableist and sexist slurs
representation: main character with depression, main gay character with an eating disorder, main bisexual character, side m/m relationship, side mlm character

I'll start this by saying that this is Alice Oseman's weakest book, but I genuinely think that's a good thing. It means that she's developed as a writer, something which you can definitely tell as you read her books. And this is by no means a bad book; in fact, if I had read this a few years ago it probably would have been one of my favourite books.

This book follows Tori Spring as a person/group known as Solitaire starts playing harmless pranks on her school that become not-so-harmless as time goes on. This book impressively managed to have a compelling mystery and good character drama, something I'm discovering is rarely a given with contemporary-mysteries.

Even if I didn't like all of the characters as people, I still thought all of them were interesting. Tori is sometimes incredibly unlikable, particularly at the start, but even when you hate her she's still interesting which I'll take any day over a boring protagonist. I loved Nick and Charlie, though that may be because I read Heartstopper first so take that with a grain of salt. Becky, Lucas and Michael all took a little longer to warm up to me, but I ended up really enjoying reading about all of them.

Alice Oseman has this great theme throughout all of her books of school being important, but also not being for everyone. She's aware that all of her characters are privileged in that they get to attend good schools while always allowing them to hate school if they want because school just doesn't gel with some people. I particularly loved Michael describing that no matter how hard he tries he just can't do well on tests and the way that teachers treat him like he's an idiot who doesn't give a shit because of that.

I thought the ending was a bit abrupt. The book ends pretty quickly after you find out who Solitaire is, which makes narrative sense, but also leaves a lot of character-threads hanging. On the one hand, it felt very real to not have everything tied up neatly, but I also wish it were a bit longer so we could have had a bit more resolution to some things.

I really liked this and would recommend reading it, but if you've read Alice Oseman's other books then I wouldn't go in with the expectation that this will be the best of them all.